Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?

[with Response]
Author(s): Monica A. Coleman, Katie G. Cannon, Arisika Razak, Irene Monroe, Debra
Mubashshir Majeed, Lee Miena Skye, Stephanie Y. Mitchem and Traci C. West
Source: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion , Spring, 2006, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring,
2006), pp. 85-134
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of FSR, Inc

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 JFSR 22.1 (2006) 85-134

Roundtable Discussion
MUST I BE WOMANIST?

MUST I BE WOMANIST?
Monica A. Coleman

Early Influences: Black Feminist and Womanist

I'm a black female religious scholar, but I'm not sure I'm a womanist. I
was a black feminist before I heard of "womanist." I discovered black feminists
in college when studying the black arts movements of the 1970s. I identified
black feminism with the 1970s-black power, poetry, literature, and defiance.
In my eyes, black feminists were radical, fire-eating, justice-loving, law-defying
women. Later in my college career, I came to the term womanist through lit
erature. While writing a paper on Their Eyes Were Watching God, I read Alice
Walker's essays about recovering Zora Neale Hurston. I appreciated and related
to Walker's quest for a role model: "I write all the things I should have been able
to read."'
I later learned of the womanist movement in religious scholarship. While
looking for religious themes in black women's writings, I came across Katie G.
Cannon's Black Womanist Ethics (1988).2 It was the first time I read about black
women's literature from the perspective of a religious scholar. As a result of
Cannon's work and that of other womanists, I never once doubted that I could
have a place in religious scholarship. I never felt the pain that no one was talk
ing about my experience, my literature, or my role models. I know that the first

1 Alice Walker, "Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist's
Life," in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jova
novich, 1983), 13. See also Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1937).
2 Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988).

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 86 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

generation of womanist religious scholars worked hard to create a world where

a young woman could have this kind of experience. They gave me the experi
ence they wanted to have; the experience they should have been able to have.
For this, I am grateful beyond words, and I think of them as my godmothers.
They mothered me into the academic study of God.
As I have met the women whose work I read, I know them as more than
writers and scholars. They are passionate people of faith, dedicated teachers,
gentle and encouraging mentors, and weary but joyful trailblazers. I can't imag
ine what kind of scholar I would be, what kind of woman I would be, if I had
not encountered Walker, Cannon, and Renita Weems, and encountered them
before William Faulkner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Walter Brueggemann.
I tell these stories as more than personal narrative. I believe that I am one of
a number of black female scholars who do not know the world or the discipline
of religious studies without the influence of feminist and womanist religious
scholarship. I question my identity as womanist because I've also been shaped
by black feminists, and I believe that I'm part of a generation of women who
have grown up (intellectually) during a time that takes womanism as a given.

Not a Womanist: Critiques and Black Feminist Leanings

I'm not sure I'm a womanist. In her definition, Walker describes woman
ist as "a black feminist or feminist of color."3 But I've long sensed a difference
between the two-or at least in the way the two movements have developed.
There are those who identify specifically as "womanist": Cannon, Delores Wil
liams, Emilie Townes, and Jacquelyn Grant. And there are some people who call
themselves "black feminist" but not "womanist": Angela Davis, Beverly Guy
Sheftall, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith. I haven't been able to put
my finger on the precise nature of this difference, but I have some intimations.
When I read Walker's definition, I feel at home, but the trajectory of wom
anist religious scholarship has left me in a house without enough furniture.
There are not enough chairs, couches, or beds for me or many of the black
women I know and love. It isn't a place where we can be who we are in some of
the most important ways we live-sexually, spiritually, or politically. I've been
dissatisfied by the heteronormativity of womanist religious scholarship. Walker
clearly states that a womanist "loves other women sexually and/or nonsexually."
I think it no coincidence that Walker references sexual love before nonsexual
love, and that this phrase falls before her reference to loving men. Walker gives
a primacy to the sexual love between women, something that womanists have
often failed to do.
Womanist religious scholars have done very little to address the theological,

3 All references to Walker's definition are found in Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gar
dens, xi-xii.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 87

spiritual, and religious experiences of black lesbians (and gays). More than ten
years ago, womanist theologian Renee Hill critiqued her colleagues for their
failure to address the issue of lesbianism: "Christian women have failed to rec
ognize heterosexism and homophobia as points of oppression that need to be
resisted if all Black women (straight, lesbian and bisexual) are to have liberation
and a sense of their own power."4 On the one hand, womanist theologians have
long been willing to add heterosexism to the matrix of oppressive forces that
affect the lives of black women (in addition to racism, sexism, and classism).5 In
fact, Kelly Brown Douglas does this as early as The Black Christ (1994) and gives
it greater attention in her later book Sexuality and the Black Church (1999),6 To
her credit, Douglas writes about the entire purview of black sexuality and the
black church, and other womanists actively teach about heterosexism and ho
mophobia.7 I'm not sure which is more disappointing though -that no woman
ist wrote more than a few paragraphs about homosexuality until the twenty-first
century, or that Douglas connects the church's need to address homosexuality
with the HIV/AIDS crisis in the black community.8
Generally, however, womanist religious scholarship is typified by a silence
about homosexuality. At times the silence is obvious and deafening. Womanists
reference Audre Lorde's discussion of the erotic as power without discussing
Lorde's personal expression of the erotic. Womanists discuss Baby Suggs's ser
mon in Toni Morrison's Beloved's Clearing without including the perhaps-sexual
relationship in Morrison's Sula.9 Womanists frequently cite Celie and Shug's
conversation about God in Walker's The Color Purple, while omitting the pas

4 Ren?e Leslie Hill, "Who Are We for Each Other? Sexism, Sexuality and Womanist Theol
ogy," in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 2nd ed., vol. 2,1980-1992, ed. James H. Cone
and Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 346.
5 Delores S. Williams, "A Womanist Perspective on Sin," in A Troubling in My Soul: Wom
anist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, Bishop Henry NcNeal Studies in North American Black
Religion 8 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 146-47; Toinette M. Eugene, '"Swing Low, Sweet Char
iot!': A Womanist Response to Sexual Violence and Abuse," in Violence against Women and Chil
dren: A Christian Theological Sourcebook, ed. Carol J. Adams and Marie M. Fortune (New York:
Continuum, 1995), 189.
6 Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ, Bishop Henry McNeal Studies in North Ameri
can Black Religion 9 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 101; Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the
Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999).
7 See interviews with Jacquelyn Grant, Emilie M. Townes, Kelly Brown Douglas, and M.
Shawn Copeland in Gary David Comstock, A Whosoever Church: Welcoming Lesbians and Gay
Men into African American Congregations (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001).
8 Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, 1-3. Douglas acknowledges that there is no
direct correlation between homosexuality and HIV/AIDS; nevertheless, she uses the HIV/
AIDS crisis as a personal and institutional entr?e into the discussion of homophobia in the black
community (3).
9 Toni Morrison, Beloved: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1987); Toni Morrison, Sula (New
York: Knopf, 1973).

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88 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

sionate love Celie finds in Shug's arms.'0 Without giving detailed attention to
the issue of sexual orientation, womanists paint a picture of black women as
sisters, other-mothers, girlfriends, and loving church mothers, when there is
much more to the picture. Douglas asserts that this silence is part of the over
all taboo of discussing sexuality within the black community." Karen Baker
Fletcher is more direct: "I suspect that for many [womanists, our silence about
homosexuality] is for the same reason that many gays and lesbians hesitate to
come out of the closet: fear of losing a job, of being thrown out of church,
ostracized in the community."'12 The silence is understandable, but it quickly
becomes complicity.
This silence is particularly disturbing given the fact that black lesbians were
so active and vocal in the development of black feminism. In the Combahee
River Collective's black feminist statement of 1977, the authors repeatedly refer
to the collaboration among "black feminists and lesbians."''3 In "The Failure
to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community" (1983), Cheryl Clarke
harshly criticizes black female scholars for their homophobic silence: "Like her
black male counterpart, the black woman intellectual is afraid to relinquish het
erosexual privilege." Clarke insists that the black community address homopho
bia, not because of HIV/AIDS or to fight oppression, but because "ain't lesbians
women too?"'4 Self-identified black feminists spoke out about the issue of het
erosexism more than twenty years before womanist religious scholars did.
Black female ethicist Cheryl Sanders readily, and appropriately, I believe,
divorces herself from the label "womanist," because she refuses to "affirm and/
or advocate homosexual practices.'5 For this reason, she argues, no Christian
should embrace the label "womanist." In many ways, I agree. If one is not willing
to openly, forthrightly, and consistently critique heterosexism and homophobia
with the same fervor as the critique of sexism, racism, and classism, then per
haps one should not be a "womanist."
As noted earlier, I also feel that womanist religious scholarship has not done

10 Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Washington Square, 1982); Cheryl Clarke
makes a similar critique in "The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,"
in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983),
203-5.
11 Kelly Brown Douglas, "Daring to Speak: Womanist Theology and Black Sexuality," in Em
bracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation, ed. Emilie M.
Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 236-37.
12 Karen Baker-Fletcher in Karen Baker-Fletcher and Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher, My
Sister, My Brother: Womanist and Xodus God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 259.
13 Combahee River Collective, "Black Feminist Statement," in All the Women Are White, All
the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, ed. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia
Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), 13-22.
14 Clarke, "Failure to Transform," 205.
15 Cheryl J. Sanders, "Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective," Journal of
Feminist Studies in Religion 5, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 90.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 89

well in reflecting the religious pluralism of black women's faith associations.

When Walker writes that a womanist "loves the Spirit," womanist religious
scholars seem to have read, "loves the Christian Spirit." I cannot fault woman
ists for being true to their own faith declarations, which often are Christian. In
fact, womanist religious scholars have done a wonderful job at transforming
the church from within. Marcia Riggs analyzes sexism within black churches in
Plenty Good Room (2003). Cheryl Townsend Gilkes reminds the black church of
its historical and contemporary dependence on black women in "If It Wasn'tfor
the Women" (2001). In Time for Honor, Delores Carpenter writes extensively
on the often-inequitable experiences of black female clergy in comparison with
their male counterparts.'6 Many womanists maintain a commitment to write for
both the church and the academy: Renita Weems, Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, and
Karen Baker-Fletcher immediately come to mind. Where others may have, and
some have, given up on the church's ability to include and value the voices and
leadership of women, Christian womanists cling to their faith and the ground of
this faith with a tenacity that is second to none.
In this process, however, womanists have often assumed that black women's
religious experiences are Christian. Sanders's earlier comment reveals both the
assertion of a particular kind of Christianity and the assumption that woman
ist religious scholars always reference Christianity. Baker-Fletcher notes that
womanists have often followed the pattern of "black Christian women" who
tend to "conflate God (Creator), Jesus, and Holy Spirit during the ordinary,
everyday eloquent prayers in homes, churches, and gatherings."'7 Without clari
fying the theological difference between God and Jesus, womanists are inca
pable of speaking to the many black women who do not identify as Christian (or
Christians with low Christologies). Intentionally or not, womanists have created
a Christian hegemonic discourse within the field.
This christocentric discourse leaves womanist religious scholarship without
a language for many black women's religious experiences. How, for example,
might a womanist interpret the strength Tina Turner finds in Buddhism and the
role her faith played in helping her to leave a violent relationship? More impor
tant, how would a womanist describe Walker's "born-again pagan" spirituality?'8
Few womanist scholars have dared to describe black women's spirituality when

16 Marcia Y. Riggs, Plenty Good Room: Women versus Male Power in the Black Church
(Cleveland: Pilgrim, 2003); Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "If It Wasn't for the Women . . .": Black
Women's Experience and Culture in Church and Community (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001); De
lores C. Carpenter, Time for Honor: A Portrait of African American Clergywomen (St. Louis:
Chalice, 2001).
17 Karen Baker-Fletcher in Baker-Fletcher and Baker-Fletcher, My Sister, My Brother, 31.
18 Alice Walker, "The River: Honoring the Difficult," in The Same River Twice: Honoring
the Difficult; A Meditation on Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the Film "The Color Purple" Ten
Years Later (New York: Scribner, 1996), 25.

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 90 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

a womanist is one who "loves nature" or "loves the universe."'9 I find this aspect
of womanist religious scholarship particularly painful, because the Christian as
sumption does not speak to the multifaith nature of my own spirituality and
scholarship.
Black feminists have been more willing to consider non-Christian reli
gions. As a Lucumi priestess20 and voodoo researcher, Luisah Teish describes
"woman-oriented magical practices" in the early black feminist anthology Home
Girls (1983).21 Teish connects New Orleans voodoo and the leadership of Marie
LaVeau and her female descendants to African women and black feminism,
asserting that the religious practices "can be used to harness power and direct
it toward social change."22 In 1981, black feminist Sabrina Sojourner described
black men and women's departure from the church into goddess religions. Ac
knowledging that some white feminists are well known for their rejection of
Christianity (Mary Daly, Starhawk, and Carol Christ come to mind), Sojourner
highlighted the goddess heritage of black women.23 In fact, the anthology with
the most diverse representation of black women's spirituality was compiled
by a self-identified black feminist: Gloria Wade-Gayles's My Soul Is a Witness
(1995).24
Womanist religious scholarship has taken few strong political stances. This
is not to say that womanist religious scholarship is apolitical. Womanist scholars
have excavated and analyzed the politics of African American women in history.
Riggs includes political leaders such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Mary Church Ter
rell, and Shirley Chisholm as "prophetic voices" in her 1997 anthology Can I
Get a Witness?25 Townes examines the moral fervor and influence of Ida Wells
Barnett's antilynching campaign in Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (1993).26
In Witnessing and Testifying (2003), Rosetta E. Ross discusses the moral and re
ligious fiber of the work of several African American female activists.27 Williams,

19 Only two womanists have ventured close: Karen Baker-Fletcher, in Sisters of Dust, Sisters
of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), and Barbara A.
Holmes, in Race and the Cosmos: An Invitation to View the World Differently (Harrisburg, PA:
Trinity Press International, 2002).
20 Lucumi is a West African Yoruba-based religion closely related to Santeria.
21 Luisah Teish, "Women's Spirituality: A Household Act," in Smith, Home Girls, 333.
22 Ibid.
23 Sabrina Sojourner, "From the House of Yemanja: The Goddess Heritage of Black Women,"
in The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist
Movement, ed. Charlene Spretnak (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1982), 57-63.
24 Gloria Wade-Gayles, ed., My Soul Is a Witness: African-American Women's Spirituality
(Boston: Beacon, 1995).
25 Marcia Y. Riggs, ed., Can I Get a Witness? Prophetic Religious Voices of African Ameri
can Women (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997).
26 Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993).
27 Rosetta E. Ross, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 91

Grant, and Douglas have given sustained attention to the ways that slavery and
white racism shaped the particular religious experiences of black women. Most
womanists have not, however, connected black women's historic beliefs with
the rationale for why one should continue to believe the same things in today's
postmodem pluralistic context. Thus, they have been more descriptive than
proscriptive and have tackled few issues of contemporary politics.
Some womanists have, nevertheless, engaged current affairs. Kirk-Duggan's
work on violence discusses black women's experiences with sexual, domestic,
and gang violence and the complicity of religion.28 Baker-Fletcher's Sisters of
Dust, Sisters of Spirit (1998) draws the church's attention to issues of environ
mental racism.29 Townes's Breaking the Fine Rain of Death (1998) eloquently
describes the health-care crises in the African American community.30 These
works connect black women's (Christian) spirituality to important crises and
their correlative public-policy issues. They raise the consciousness of both ec
clesial and academic communities, and offer suggestions for next steps. I am,
however, still disappointed that few womanist religious scholars, nonethicists in
particular, will boldly state, "One ought to believe X" or "One should interpret
the text in Y way" because this (womanist) perspective has uncovered an impor
tant and crucial insight.
This critique brings up the larger issue of the scope of womanist religious
scholarship. The descriptive nature of womanist religious scholarship suggests
that it is of black women, by black women, for black women. If so, is the aca
demic contribution any greater than telling white folk what we already know
about our own spirituality? Is a book a piece of womanist religious scholarship
if the author identifies herself as a womanist but makes no reference to the par
ticular experiences of black women? Or is a work womanist because it draws on
the work of womanist religious scholars? Does drawing from the experiences of
black women make something womanist? Can womanists make religious asser
tions for all people? Or have womanists shied so far away from the universalism
of white men's experiences that they are reluctant to expand the insights from
black women's experiences to a more universal audience?
Perhaps it is the political edge that draws me toward the label "black femi
nist." The wordfeminist still conjures images of the commitments I express on
a daily basis-issues around music, love, and teaching. Johnnetta Cole and Bev

28 Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Refiner's Fire: A Religious Engagement with Violence (Minne

apolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000) and Misbegotten Anguish: A Theology and Ethics of Violence
(St. Louis: Chalice, 2002). I do not include Traci C. West's Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women,
Violence, and Resistance Ethics (New York: New York University Press, 1999) here, because West
intentionally identifies herself as a "black feminist."
29 Baker-Fletcher, Sisters of Dust.
30 Emilie M. Townes, Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and
a Womanist Ethic of Care (New York: Continuum, 1998). I want to note that this work is not very
christocentric and is open to non-Christian interpretation and use.

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92 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

erly Guy-Sheftall boldly critique the misogyny of hip-hop culture.3' In her work,
bell hooks writes candidly of men, women, love, and sex.32 I turn to Patricia Hill
Collins every semester to check my feminist pedagogy.33 To put it in anecdotal
terms, when I tell my black male friends that I'm a womanist, they think of me
as a black churchwoman, which I sometimes am. When I tell them that I am
a black feminist, they get a little uneasy, because they start to wonder if I'm
aligned with lesbians, if I'm going to question their power, and if I'm going to
call God "She"-all of which I also do. I find the wordfeminist, whether modi
fied by black or not, to have the disruptive effect that I want.
In her 1996 essay "What's in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and
Beyond," Patricia Hill Collins writes about the schisms between "womanists"
and "black feminists." She notes that Walker's definition highlights the existing
heterogeneity within black social and political thought-the same heteroge
neity that exists among black women. Collins chastises the scholars who self
identify as womanist and "carefully select the parts that agree with their world
view and reject the rest," and calls womanists to distinguish between using the
word womanist to "describe black women's historical responses" and using it to
"delineate an ethical or ideal vision."34
Collins also talks about the connotation of being a black feminist. Black
feminists are associated with an advocacy of the economic, political, marital,
and health rights of women around the globe. One more readily thinks of black
feminists as entering into conversation with white feminists, lesbians, and poli
tics in general. Still, Collins wonders how black feminists will contend with the
issues of difference, deconstruction, and individualism that typify feminism. Do
they, she asks, limit their ability to communicate with black religious traditions
that may have theological or biblical contestations with an embrace of homosex
uality? I agree with Collins on all points. Womanist religious scholarship makes
me feel that I am grounded in my own history. But black feminism makes me
feel global and political. They both have shortcomings.

Must Be Womanist: The Branding of "Womanist"

I'm a black female religious scholar. On the academic job market, that
means I'm also a womanist. As I approached both the job market and the writ
ing of my dissertation, I found that my colleagues and superiors had an often
stated assumption not only that I was familiar with womanist theology but also

31 Johnnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women's
Equality in African American Communities (New York: One World / Ballantine, 2003), 182-215.
32 bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: Perennial Currents, 2001).
33 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics
of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991).
34 Patricia Hill Collins, "What's in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond,"
Black Scholar 26, no. 1 (Winter-Spring 1996): 16.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 93

that I was committed to writing womanist theology. The assumption is that all
black women in the academic study of religion are womanists. Sadly enough, it
is almost a marketable necessity. Whatever my academic proficiencies, inter
viewing committees always ask, "Can you teach black and womanist theology?"
This fact became clear: if I wanted to get a job, I had better identify as a woman
ist, and do it quickly. The theme continues as I prepare to publish revisions of
my dissertation. The word womanist should appear in the title, I am told. That
way, editors say, people can find the book when they do a word search and the
publishers know how to identify the book.
I give these personal sketches as examples of the commodification and
commercialization of the term womanist within the academic study of religion.
I cannot imagine that the first womanists ever dreamed that this would happen.
After all, as Cannon says, so many of them had to fight just to prove that black
women were a legitimate subject/object of study in the field of religion.35 As
womanist religious scholars grew from the initial triumvirate (Cannon, Grant,
and Weems) to a second and third generation of black female religious scholars,
the term womanist was inserted and generally accepted as a significant field of
study. One dare not study liberation theologies or feminist theologies without
mention of womanist theology. For this, there is cause celebre. But has this prog
ress forced all black female religious scholars into the rubric of "womanist"?
The academy's religion market does not bear sole responsibility for the
branding of "womanist." Black female religious scholars use the word womanist
to identify a support network, Listserv, and programmatic section at local and
national meetings of the American Academy of Religion. The term womanist
was originally created to engender freedom: Walker chose the word because it
was "more reflective of black women's culture, especially Southern culture."36
She liked "the feel, the fit, the sound" of the word.37 I don't always feel or fit into
"womanist." As I choose a name for myself, I commit treason against someone
either the womanists who mentored me into religion or the black feminists who
raised my consciousness, employed me, and encouraged my writing.38
Just as the field of womanist religious scholarship has grown in convergence
with and departure from Walker's life and definition, so the term womanist may
now be larger than the women who initially claimed it. Can womanists reclaim

35 Katie G. Cannon, "Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community"
(Women in Ministry and Justice Lecture Series, Bennett College for Women, Greensboro, NC,
March 2005).
36 Alice Walker, "Audre's Voice," in Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer's Activism
(New York: Random House, 1997), 80.
37 David Bradley, "Alice Walker: Telling the Black Women's Story," New York Times Maga
zine, January 8,1984,25-37.
38 Here I am referring to my employment at Bennett College for Women, where self
identified black feminist Johnnetta B. Cole is the president; and to my meeting with Gloria Wade
Gayles at the Southern Writers' Festival (July 1998).

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 94 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

the term? Do they even want to? Is this commercialization a sign of advance
ment? Or have hierarchical (often white and male) entities co-opted it, as yet
another way to brand and classify black women and our thoughts? If this is the
case, womanism has not had the revolutionary effect of its black feminist roots.
Perhaps the realistic need for job security tempers the fire of the revolution.

More Womanists: A Third Wave?

I'm a black female religious scholar, and I've been strongly influenced by
both black feminism and womanist religious scholarship. In Introducing Black
Theology of Liberation (1999), Dwight Hopkins identifies a first generation and
second generation of black theologians, applauding the womanists for challeng
ing the sexism of their male elders in black theology.39 But Hopkins does not
classify my generation of black female religious scholars.
What would it mean to discuss a third generation of black religious scholar
ship? Perhaps black religious scholarship is experiencing something similar to
feminism's third wave. Third-wave feminism is the name given to an eclectic
group of young feminists with diverse issues and strategies of addressing injus
tice in contemporary society. It is easier to describe who the third wave is than
what the third wave is. Third-wave feminists are the generation of women and
men who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. Third wavers are the "first gen
eration for whom feminism has been entwined in the fabric of [their] lives."40
Yet third-wave feminists believe that theirs is better identified as a political gen
eration.4' That is, membership in the third wave is determined not simply by
age or birth rite but by affiliation with similar issues and politics.42 Third wavers
represent diverse issues as they break away from the definitive stance of the
previous generation. Some will eschew the problems and terms of their fore
bears. Others will want to claim them and change their meaning. Third-wave
feminists are individualistic and communitarian, academics, activists and stay
at-home moms, knitters and athletes, bitches, dykes, and ladies. Third wavers
want to live out the rights for which the second generation fought.
Acknowledging a third wave within black religious scholarship may allow
for the reclamation of religious heritage and terminology. I have colleagues who
refuse to be called "womanist," preferring instead "black feminist," because

39 Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY:

Orbis, 1999).
40 Barbara Findlen, introduction to Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation
(Seattle: Seal Press, 1995), xii.
41 Nancy Whittier, "Turning It Over: Personnel Change in the Columbus, Ohio, Women's
Movement, 1969-1984," in Feminist Organizations: Harvest of the New Women's Movement, ed.
Myra Marx and Patricia Yancey Martin (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 180.
42 Rita Alfonso and Jo Trigilio, "Surfing the Third Wave: A Dialogue between Two Third
Wave Feminists," Hypatia: AJournal of Feminist Philosophy 12, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 7-16.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 95

they do not want to be associated with what they see as the shortcomings of
womanist religious scholarship. I also have a cadre of friends who still want to
own the label "womanist" and bring it back to its roots in Walker's definition and
writings. Some black female religious scholars still want to be called "womanist"
as they broaden the field. Three examples come to mind: Dianne Stewart, who
works with Caribbean religions; Tracey Hucks, who works on African traditional
religions; and Debra Mubashshir Majeed, who works in Islam. Still others want
to qualify their womanist associations. Baker-Fletcher has claimed the label
"Walker-womanist" as she articulates her convergences with and departures
from Alice Walker's expressed spirituality.43
The idea of a third wave of black religious scholarship could lead to a re
definition of womanist religious scholarship. Such naming has room for Randall
Bailey, who is currently calling himself a "womanist sympathizer."44 This kind
of womanism could include Darnise C. Martin's work with African American
new-thought religions, Irene Monroe's black lesbian commitments, and my de
cidedly Whiteheadian process theology. This terminology may give my wave of
black female religious scholars a reason to call ourselves "womanist." We would
be grateful for the work of the earlier generations, and, given the relative youth
of this theological movement, we can be rather excited that there is a third
wave already. We can identify ourselves as male and female, Christian, Mus
lim, pagan, new-thought, Buddhist, and Ifa. We can call ourselves academics
and activists and ministers, priests, nuns, and iyalorishas.45 We will be straight,
lesbian, and bisexual, faithful and humanist. We knit, make jewelry, sing, write
poetry, and dance. We run two miles a day, lift weights, and climb rocks. Some
of us may be southerners, Christians, and members of the NAACP. Others of us
may be northerners, Dutch, South Africans, Black Nationalists, or Greens. This
wave can reserve the right to, in fact relish in the opportunity to, challenge the
assumptions of those who have come before.
This wave may tackle some of the issues that the second wave missed: bi
sexuality, colorism and standards of beauty,46 eating disorders and obesity, class
realities (after all, if we're writing books, we can't be too far down on the class
scale), mental health, progressive Christianity, paganism, indigenous spiritual

43 Karen Baker-Fletcher, "Womanist Passion," in The Passion of the Lord: African American
Reflections, ed. James A. Noel and Matthew V. Johnson (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005),
125-36.
44 Randall C. Bailey, lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Black Reli
gion (Louisville Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY, March 11,2005).
45 Ifa is a system of divination among the Yoruba of West Africa. Many African Americans
refer to the practice of traditional Yoruba religion with the term Ifa. Iyalorishas are priestesses in
this tradition.
46 "Colorism" is another aspect of black experiences that Alice Walker references in the defi
nition of womanist: "Well, you know the colored race is just like a flower garden, with every color
flower represented." See footnote 3.

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 96 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

ity, and participation in other world religions-like Baha'i and Buddhism. These
are the issues I want to read about. Then again, there could be other options.
We might need to keep the distinction between "black feminist" and "woman
ist" to connote our commitments, putting on the mask of "womanist" when it's
time to get that job. It could be time for new words, or a modifier for "woman
ist." Or maybe we'll find that the term womanist has had its run, and it is time
for a new term altogether.

RESPONSE
Katie G. Cannon

Answering Monica Coleman's question, "Must I be womanist?" seems a

logical place to begin my response. No, it is not necessary or essential that every
African American female be self-identified as a womanist. The what, how, and
why of the womanist definition bear broad application, indicating that a wom
anist is a self-naming sensibility that is not coerced.' Black feminists and other
feminists of color embrace the label "womanist"-and the epistemological
mandate that it implies-by our own conscious volition and free will. In other
words, for those of us who read and subscribe to the Journal of Feminist Studies
in Religion, "womanist" is the methodological framework that the vast majority
of African American women have been using for the past twenty years to chal
lenge inherited traditions of androcentric patriarchy, and as a method of engag
ing in revolutionary acts of resistance as members of the American Academy of
Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature.
For two decades women scholars of African descent have exposed layer
upon layer of shocking inequalities in the world of religious studies. From 1985
until now, womanists have been most vocal despite intense opposition via white
supremacy, male superiority, and class elitism concerning black women's sub
stantive contributions as full-fledged members within theological discourse.
While this is not an easy task, womanists contend that we must name-and
continue to name-the particularities of God's presence in our everyday reali
ties, because such clarity enhances our ability to tap the sacred foundation of
our common humanity.
Erasing twenty years of intellectual history by eliminating womanist from
our ongoing vocabulary reminds me of what Soraya Murray and Derek Conrad
Murray discuss as the hip-hop generation's need to create an iconographic aes
thetic by shedding conventional notions of what "blackness" traditionally sym
bolized in the identity politics codified in the 1980s. In their essay "A Rising

1 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi-xii.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 97

Generation and the Pleasures of Freedom," Murray and Murray state, "Terms
like 'post-black,' 'post-soul aesthetic' . . . are being coined to try and capture
what appears to be a distinctive shift in a generation that has grown up after
the civil rights era."2 However, I see that the real challenge before us is not to
become "post-womanist" but to investigate feasible ways to actualize the defi
nition of womanism so that we address the disturbing realities that Coleman
describes with prophetic accuracy-without dismantling the womanist house
of wisdom.
According to Coleman, "[T]he trajectory of womanist religious scholarship
has left me in a house without enough furniture." As a first-generation woman
ist, I accept Coleman's critique of "a house without enough furniture" as a fair
and honest assessment. The analogy that comes to mind takes me back to the
summer of 1971, when I was a member of an Operation Crossroads Africa work
camp of twelve young adults in the town of Pleebo, near Cape Palmas, Liberia.
Our assignment was to build a library. None of us had ever done construction
work before. Nevertheless, for approximately six hours every day for sixty days,
we adorned our pith helmets, brogans, and work gloves; shouldered pickaxes,
shovels, and spades; and rode on the back of rickety, wobbly dump trucks haul
ing sand from the oceanside to our work site in our effort to dig and pour a
foundation. This common undertaking in any construction project is of utmost
importance, because the foundation is the portion of any structure that trans
fers the weight of the building to the ground. The foundation is the first part of
the building, in some ways the hardest part, though the least accommodating
and least elegant. It establishes the basic footing for future construction.
Those of us who have been busy doing womanist work from the moment
that we enrolled in seminary believe that we have built a solid womanist founda
tion. We officially began constructing this womanist house of wisdom in 1985,
and as intellectual laborers we continue to work day in and day out so that our
scholarly infrastructure is built on solid rock instead of shifting sand. Let us
celebrate this analogous reality by acknowledging that the second generation
of womanist scholars has completed the structure of the womanist house of
wisdom,3 and now it is time for Coleman's contemporaries, whom she identifies
as the "third wave," to furnish the interior, to provide supportive objects that
indicate a readiness for occupancy.

2 See Soraya Murray and Derek Conrad Murray, "A Rising Generation and the Pleasures
of Freedom," in "Post-Black, Post-Soul, or Hip-Hop Iconography?Defining a New Aesthetics,"
special issue, International Review of African American Art 20, no. 2 (2005): 3. Growing numbers
of African American women and men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five find the strident
understandings of "blackness" and "soul" that were codified in the 1970s by civil rights activists
and black power strategists foreign to their twenty-first-century self-understanding.
3 For a detailed discussion of the womanist house of wisdom, see Katie G. Cannon, Alison P.
Gise Johnson, and Angela D. Sims, "Womanist Works in Word," Journal of Feminist Studies in
Religion 21, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 135-46.

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98 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

There are additional truths in Coleman's essay, for example, her critique
of womanism and sexuality: "Womanist religious scholars have done very little
to address the theological, spiritual, and religious experiences of black lesbians
(and gays)." In both substance and tone, Coleman prompts an examination of
our starting point-the sexual realities of American women of African descent
as a result of the transatlantic slave trade-regarding human sexuality. She in
vites us to break the silence regarding the extremely touchy subject of hetero
normativity. We womanists, for our part, must lay bare the persistent and col
lective struggle of African Americans to counter more than four hundred years
of dehumanizing, racist stereotypes of the "black body as ugly" while simultane
ously being an "object of sexual desire."
Although it is fairly uncontroversial to say that the vast majority of Afri
can American women are caught in the midst of competing sexual realities,
the extent that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons experience
death-dealing dynamics (for example, rape, battering, medical butchering, sex
motivated murder, forced prostitution, and physical mutilation) in the dailiness
of life is often a forbidden topic in ecclesiastical conversations. Until recently,
black women's bodies have been degraded, demeaned, and demonized-locked
into an oppressive gaze of so-called normative beauty created in opposition to
us, and in turn we, as first-generation womanists, have been taught (and far
too many womanists continue to teach black females) that we must suppress,
repress, compress, and depress the sexual aspect of our humanity by reinforc
ing norms and practices that proclaim procreative sex as a gift from God and
relational or recreational sex as the devil's handiwork. In essence, the moralizing
hegemonic construct of irreconcilable opposites insists either that sex is a posi
tive blessing for procreative purposes only or that sex is a negative curse that
lays claim to bodily pleasure. Interestingly enough, when perceived through the
lens of heteropatriarchal imagination (that is, the assumption that normal sexual
activity should occur only between female and male in a reproductive context),
the pleasures of genital-sexual eroticism lock African Americans between rig
idly disembodied hetero-homo binaries.4
Coleman's essay is both lucid and candid, incorporating equal measures of
personal and academic integrity as she outlines the narrative history of the wom
anist movement in juxtaposition with feminism. As readers, we easily grasp some
of the jarring circumstances and religious complexities that cause the post-civil
rights-movement generation of African Americans to question this intellectual
inheritance. The primary dilemma here, and one that Coleman employs as her
overarching inquiry, is whether our twenty-year struggle to build this womanist
house of wisdom can ever result in a third-wave womanist's home.

4 Katie G. Cannon, "Sexing Black Women: Liberation from the Prisonhouse of Anatomical
Authority," in Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic, ed. Anthony B. Pinn and
Dwight N. Hopkins (New York: Palgrave / Macmillan, 2004), 11-30.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 99

RESPONSE
Arisika Razak

I am extremely grateful for Monica Coleman's insightful and scholarly dis

cussion of womanist ideology. Her enumeration of the adaptations, excisions,
and reframings of the womanist concept that have arisen in individuals and
communities who utilize this term is long overdue. In a world of multiple iden
tities and diverse and conflicting ideologies, Black women must courageously
name and explore our differences if we are to form true alliances with one an
other. The shared experiences of racism, sexism, and classism-difficult and
ubiquitous as they are-have not been sufficient to bring us together in move
ments benefiting the diasporic collective, and although the term womanist may
have been offered initially in hopes of forming a common language for the expe
riences and activism of Black women, our differences have proved to be at least
as significant as our similarities. Coleman's fearless exploration of this concept's
contested terrain offers us a welcome starting point for the elucidation of our
differences.
Although I don't define myself as a Black religious scholar, much of Cole
man's discussion resonates with me. I am not a Christian, but I am an activist
and healer. As a practitioner of women's spirituality, I take refuge in a tradition
that embraces female embodiment and divinity, liberation work and activism, a
direct and personal relationship to spirit, and openness to and acceptance of a
diversity of identities.
Unlike Coleman, I define myself as a womanist. I find identity and meaning
in Walker's four-part definition of womanist, which she defines first as "a black
feminist or feminist of color."1 This widely quoted definition, which has been
embraced by some and fiercely criticized by others, praises Black women's lead
ership ability in current and historic liberation struggles that benefit all mem
bers of the African American community.2 Womanism, as defined by Walker,
validates our ability to love, support, and nurture women and men "sexually
and/or nonsexually"; honors the diversity, beauty, and "roundness" of our physi
cal form(s); and proclaims the importance of rest, healing, and self-care. Walker
notes that the activism and agency of African American women occasionally
put us in conflict with our elders-but she chooses to focus on the sharing and
mentorship that are a traditional part of idealized Black mother-daughter re

1 This and subsequent references to Walker's definition of womanist are found in Alice
Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jova
novich, 1983), xi-xii.
2 In this article, I am using African American to refer to people of African descent with
roots in the United States. For reactions to Walker's definition of womanist, see Clenora Hudson
Weems, "African Womanism" and "Self-Naming and Self-Definition: An Agenda for Survival,"
both in Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1998), 149-62 and 449-52, respectively.

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 100 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

lationships. In listing what we love as Black feminists, Walker praises music,

dance, the Spirit, and the Folk. She includes the often-neglected self in her list
and explicitly names the moon, which has been linked to women's biology and
the natural world in a variety of cultures.3
I embrace Walker's definition, because each of its parts is important to me.
For me, the struggles for racial justice, women's rights, and the right to love
whomever I wish-of whatever race or gender I choose-along with my free
dom to worship the sacred as I know, name, and experience it, come together
in a weave that honors my slave and free ancestors of African lineage, my Euro
American and indigenous roots, and my love and respect for the healing powers
of the earth. For me, this holistic tapestry of liberation is best named by the
term womanist, a term that is feminist, Afrocentric, healing, embodied, and
spiritual.4

My History
Unlike Coleman, who views feminism and womanism as separate ideolo
gies, feminism-at least Black feminism-and womanism are not conflicting
ideologies for me. I grew up in Harlem with a mother who was a single parent,
a political activist, and an elementary school teacher. In 1957, when I was nine,
we picketed Harlem's Woolworth store weekly, protesting its segregated lunch
counters in the South and its hiring practices in the North. The Black women
around my mother were not soft, pampered stay-at-home women; they were
courageous, intelligent, middle- and working-class women who struggled loudly
and vociferously against the racism of the systems around them and tried to
fashion a better world for themselves and their children. My notion of what
it meant to be a feminist was always modeled on the powerful Black women
around me who struggled for the rights of all Black people and who were sec
ond class to no one-male or female.
My consciousness was also shaped by the fact that I lived in Harlem during
the 1960s and 1970s, a period of profound Afrocentric cultural revival. I grew

3 See Barbara A. Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000);
Queen Afua, Sacred Woman: A Guide to Healing the Feminine Body, Mind, and Spirit (New
York: One World / Ballantine, 2000), 65; Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the God
dess: Evolution of an Image (London: Viking Arkana, 1991), 145-48; and Christiane Northrup,
Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom: Creating Physical and Emotional Health and Healing (New
York: Bantam, 2002), 105-6.
4 The term Afrocentric is sometimes used to support homophobic and hetero/sexist think
ing. I use it to describe African American efforts to create a perspective that serves the needs
of diverse African diasporic peoples and their individual and collective experiences. Catharine
Goboldte writes, "For African-Americans, the reclamation of African-centered perspective and
ethos is liberatory praxis." See "Laying on Hands: Women in Imani Faith Temple," in My Soul
Is a Witness: African-American Women's Spirituality, ed. Gloria Wade-Gayles (Boston: Beacon,
1995), 242.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 101

up listening to Malcolm X preach on 125th Street, worked in various Black

liberation organizations, went to the newly formed Yoruba Temple for religious
services, and briefly lived in a polygamous family. I was part of the first wave
of Black student organizing at Swarthmore College, where our Black history
study groups included the college's Black domestic workers, along with African
students from Lincoln University, the oldest of the historically Black universi
ties (founded in 1854) and also possibly the first to admit students of African
descent.
It was an exciting time for African Americans. Black women wore "natural"
hairstyles instead of straightening their hair. African clothing and dance were
popular, and African spirituality, ceremony, and languages were named, claimed,
reenacted, and rearranged by African Americans hungry to reclaim their roots.
African diasporic religion, history, and culture were fiercely debated-intellec
tually, spiritually, culturally, and politically-and new identities emerged in each
discussion. Were we the original Asiatic Black people, as Elijah Muhammad
suggested?5 Should we reclaim a heroic (and feudal) past as kings and queens
in ancient Kemit and Ethiopia?6 Should we valorize the work of our enslaved
forebears, demanding reparations in the form of our own state? Was polygamy
a realistic and necessary alternative for Black women or just an excuse for Black
men to "stray"? Popular and academic discussions of these issues occurred in
streets, classrooms, and meeting halls; they were the subject of popular songs,
plays, poetry, and sermons. The times were loud, strident, creative, spiritual,
violent, and beautiful-just as in a birth.
In retrospect, I recognize that many of the beliefs generated in this era
were not conceptually sound. African feminists have criticized African Ameri
can attempts to "essentialize" Africa or to incorrectly find support for American
sociocultural identities in African traditions.7 However, my consciousness as an
African American activist was shaped by three decades of organizing in Afro

5 Elijah Muhammad was a prominent developer of the Nation of Islam (a.k.a. the Black
Muslims), a popular Black nationalist group emphasizing self-determination, economic self-reli
ance, Black people's right to self-defense, and a strong heterosexist agenda. The group offered a
strong counter to Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent philosophy, and, until his break with the
organization, Malcolm X was one of its chief spokespersons.
6 The Egyptian hieroglyphics KMT, transliterated as "Kemit" or "Khemit," mean "the Black
place" or "place of the Blacks." See Asa Hilliard, "Bringing Maat, Destroying Isfet: The African
and African-American Presence in the Study of Ancient KMT," in Egypt: Child of Africa, ed. Ivan
Van Sertima (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 127-47.
7 See Oyeronke Oyewumi, ed., African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of
Sisterhood (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2003). Several essays critique African American "essential
izing" of Africa, that is, the blending of culturally distinct African cultures into one universalized,
fictitious whole, based on poor scholarship and psychological projections. An example of the latter
is the search for evidence of lesbian relations in woman-to-woman marriage, which in Igbo society
is not a union between two people but a social institution concerned with lineage rights and family
continuity.

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 102 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

centric, feminist, and multicultural contexts that grew out of my engagement

with the ideas of this era. Like many Black women, I followed a trajectory that
took me from work with multiracial civil rights groups in the 1960s, to Black
liberation and cultural nationalist efforts in the 1970s, to multicultural and femi
nist groups in the 1980s and health organizing in the 1990s.8
This work taught me the importance of naming and of creating new names
for new identities and new contexts. Working with other Black people, I called
myself "Negro," "Black," "African," or "Afro-American." Working with women
whose ancestors came from Africa, Asia, or the indigenous populations of
North and South America, I called myself a "person of color" or a "third-world
woman." Feminists of color taught me that I could work to eradicate racism,
sexism, classism, and homophobia without giving up membership in the Black
race,9 and Euro-American feminists gave me names for "date rape" and domes
tic violence. I initially accepted the term womanist because it was a concept that
integrated many of these struggles for empowerment and self-definition that I
had taken part in.

Other Influences
However, my resonance with the term womanism includes other factors as
well. A personal quest for "time-out" from the sexism and hierarchy of cultural
nationalism in New York led me to California in 1969. There I became involved
in a passionate and embodied relationship to the land. A former city dweller
who had lived in the concrete landscapes of New York and Philadelphia, I spent
part of the next two years camping out, and part of those years living in a com
mune in the Santa Cruz mountains. Living without electricity, I rose and slept
according to the rhythms of the sun. I camped out during the summer and dis
covered that I could safely drink the water that flowed (apparently) inexhaust
ibly from the earth. (In 1970, it was safe to drink waters that flowed in streams
and creeks in the mountains of California.) Sleeping under the stars, I opened
my senses to the physical realities of the land and our human dependence upon
it. My relationship to the world fundamentally changed. I became attached to

8 The Combahee River Collective links the emergence of Black feminist thought to the
"second wave" of American feminism and to Black liberation movements: "It was our experience
and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery
of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those
of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of black and white men." Combahee River Collec
tive, "A Black Feminist Statement," in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist
Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New Press, 1995), 233.
9 See Cheryl Clarke, "Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance," and Barbara Smith, "Some Home
Truths of the Contemporary Black Feminist Movement," both in Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire,
241-51 and 254-67, respectively; and bell hooks, "Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory," in
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End, 1984), 1-15.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 103

the landscape of northern California in deep, intuitive ways.10 More than femi
nism or cultural nationalism, Walker's concept of womanism as she writes of a
womanist's love for the moon speaks to a love for the land and the night that
emerged for me also. This love for land is one of my anchors in women's spiri
tuality, my spiritual lineage of choice.
However, it is Walker's support for the body that I most cherish. As a prac
titioner of women's spirituality, I have a sense of the sacred inextricably tied to
the physical experience and embodied awareness of the female body-which
I love and appreciate, sexually and nonsexually. I commend Coleman for her
frank discussion of the heteronormativity and homophobia that are endorsed by
some who name themselves womanists.
As a midwife of more than twenty years, I am intimately aware of the path
of active surrender, personal sacrifice, emotional empowerment, and spiritual
transcendence that women traverse as they move through the birthing pro
cess. Standing as a witness, companion, and helper to women in labor was a
life-changing event for me, as was my own experience of giving birth at home.
Nothing I had ever experienced prepared me for the holiness of the moment in
which a laboring woman turns away from preoccupation with the world to focus
on the world-making within her body-a moment that, for me, reveals the face
of God/dess as sustainer, nurturer, and creator of worlds.
I am a practitioner of women's spirituality in part because it explicitly cele
brates the power and sacredness of women's bodies. The sacredness of woman
centered experience-experience apprehended by the senses, grounded in
the world, or mediated via the embodied mysteries of childbirth, menarche,
sexuality, and menopause-lies at the heart of women's spirituality. In Walker's
description of a woman who "Loves love and food and roundness.... Loves
herself. Regardless," I find recognition for the embodiment that women's spiri
tuality celebrates, as well as explicit validation for African American women
struggling to love themselves and their bodies in spite of negative messages
from the dominant society or the African American community."
As a women's health-care practitioner for more than twenty years, I believe

10 I recognize that there is a certain amount of romanticizing in this statement. For the most
part, my commune mates and I were middle-class people with enough privilege to "drop out" and
live communally, and none of us farmed the land as a means of survival.
11 Contemporary society has decreased stereotypical portrayals of Black women as self
effacing mammies, lascivious Jezebels, and tragic mulattoes. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Femi
nist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2000), 69-92; and Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An
Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994), 3-18.
However, the absence of large, dark, full-featured, natural-haired Black women in mainstream
media, coupled with the disproportionate use of Black people's bodies to illustrate biological and
cultural deviance in science and academia, and the lack of our likeness in mainstream religious
iconography, continues to make us uncomfortable with our bodies.

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 104 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

that rejection and hatred of the female body is endemic in the United States,
leading to low self-esteem, self-destructive behaviors, and women's exploitation
via the cosmetic, health, and entertainment industries.'2 Many women inter
nalize this cultural rejection of the female body, which is linked with hatred of
female physiology and dissociation from embodied physical experience. This
cultural stance has led to a wide variety of personal, social, and cultural ills, par
ticularly in the West.'3 Some authors believe it to be especially marked among
African American women.'4
Black feminists such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks have documented
Black women's negative beliefs about the body in personal or scholarly works
without using the term womanist."5 Others, such as Cheryl Townsend Gilkes
and Valerie Lee, do use the term in their critique and analysis of the social
regard accorded to the Black woman's body in the dominant society.'6 I don't
advocate that we all use one term, and I recognize that Black feminism has not
resolved this issue. Still, womanist integrates my own spiritual, political, and
health perspectives best.
As a concept that is not linked to any particular faith tradition or denomi
nation, womanism serves African American women of diverse spiritual be
liefs. Walker's concept is historically grounded in the faith traditions of African
Americans enslaved in the United States, who re-visioned their masters' Chris
tianity and formed a religion of liberation. However, Walker did not conflate
womanism and Christianity.'7 Although I respect Christian womanists who use

12 See Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Mijth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New
York: Perennial, 2002).
13 See Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New York: Harper &
Row, 1978); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolu
tion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983); and Northrup, Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom.
14 "Self hatred may be one of the deepest sources of conflict and turmoil within the Af
rican American community. This may be especially true concerning women and their bodies."
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "The 'Loves' and 'Troubles' of African-American Women's Bodies: The
Womanist Challenge to Cultural Humiliation and Community Ambivalence," in "If It Wasn't for
the Women . . .": Black Women's Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 181. On a personal note, in practicing as a midwife for twenty-three
years, I found that women of many cultures experienced shame about the body. A small number of
African American women apologized for how they looked, for how they smelled, and for having the
bodies and genitalia of women. A fellow Black nurse-practitioner asked me once how I could be a
midwife when it was so "nasty."
15 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press,
1984); bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (New York: Holt, 1996).
16 Gilkes, " 'Loves' and 'Troubles' "; Valerie Lee, "Literary Recovery of the Granny: The
Body, the Mind, the Material" and "God and the Grannies: Testifying Theory," in Granny Mid
wives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings (New York: Routledge, 1996), 51-78
and 79-99, respectively.
17 In an e-mail message to the author, sent June 9, 2004, Alice Walker notes, "It has felt odd
to see Womanism so embedded' in Christianity. Time to liberate Her."

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 105

Walker's definition to interrogate biblical texts and to reclaim female agency

within Christian institutions, I also believe that it is important to preserve this
concept as one that is open to and inclusive of a wide variety of non-Christian
traditions.'8

Womanism: A Few Controversies

Whereas I appreciate Walker's emphasis on the self and the body, Oy
eronke Oyewumi and Clenora Hudson-Weems object to womanism's personal
and somatic emphasis.19 Oyewumi asserts that "Euro/American discourse of the
social is somatocentric.... [W]hat is believed to undergird social hierarchies,
privileges, identities, and ultimately social interest derives from the body":20

In much of Africa "womanhood" does not constitute a social role, iden

tity, position or location.... Each individual occupies a multiplicity of
overlapping and intersecting positions, with various relationships to priv
ilege and disadvantage.... It would be counterproductive in the African
setting to single out gender, which thus far has been elaborated only
as a biologistic category-a body-based identity-as the primary source
and focus of political agitation .... []n Westem conceptualization gen
der .... cannot exist without sex ... [but i]n many African societies ...
there are many social categories that do not rest on bodily distinctions of
gender. A good example is the "female husband" of Igbo culture.2'

Oyewumi believes that sociocultural constructions of motherhood may be

a better base for building unity among women in Africa than concepts of wom
anhood.22 Reviewing a few of the nongendered or gender-neutral languages of
West Africa (including Yoruba, Wolof, Igbo, Efik, Benin, Fulani, Songhoi, and
Manding), she notes that the closest equivalent for the English terms brother

18 See Renita Weems, "Womanist Reflections on Biblical Hermeneutics," in Black Theology:

A Documentary History, 2nd ed., vol. 2,1980-1992, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilm
ore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 216-24; Renita Weems, Just a Sister Away: Understanding
the Timeless Connection between Women of Today and Women in the Bible (New York: Warner,
2005); Karen Baker-Fletcher, Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and
Creation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998); and Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, "Let My People Go! Threads
of Exodus in African American Narrative," in Yet with a Steady Beat: Contemporary U. S. Afrocen
tric Biblical Interpretation, ed. Randall C. Bailey, Semeia Studies 42 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2003), 123-43.
19 Oyeronke Oyewumi, "Alice in Motherland: Reading Alice Walker and Screening the
Color 'Black' " and "Introduction: Feminism, Sisterhood, and Other Foreign Relations," both in
Oyewumi, African Women and Feminism, 159-85 and 1-24, respectively; and Hudson-Weems,
"African Womanism" and "Self-Naming and Self-Definition."
20 Oyewumi, "Alice in Motherland," 161.
21 Oyewumi, "Introduction," 2. According to Oyewumi, marriage in some African societies
refers to social relations within a family rather than sexual relations between individuals (14-16).
22 Oyewumi, "Introduction."

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106 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

and sister is the culturally normative expression "my mother's child(ren)."23 She
states that what she calls "mothernity" is "an African communitarian ideology
and ideal," and she suggests that the Spanish term comadre (used by Chicanos)
and the Caribbean term macoffere (used in Trinidad, St. Lucia, and Haiti) are
cross-cultural examples that illustrate the importance of motherhood as a social
institution linking women together in a system of mutual support.4
Hudson-Weems rejects Walker's definition of womanist, pointing out that it
emphasizes an individual woman's sexuality and culture. She has proposed the
name "Africana womanism," writing, "Africana womanism is a family-centered
rather than a female-centered perspective. By necessity, we are concerned first
and foremost with ridding society of racism, a problem which invariably affects
our entire family, our total existence. "25
I respect the views of both of these writers, yet my standpoint is shaped
by my personal experience. I am an African American raised in America and
marked by its mores and culture. I do not have an "African" experience of family
or embodiment,26 but I share American and African American definitions of the
personal and the somatic. The personal is politicalfor me; as a survivor of date
rape, I claim the ownership of my body and my sexuality as fundamental human
rights. My quest for liberation is personal, spiritual, cultural, sexual, and politi
cal, and my health work with Black women leads me to believe that our loving
ourselves is a political issue.
My appreciation for the biological abilities of women's bodies may raise the
specter of essentialism, which would limit women's spheres of influence and
activity solely to those endeavors supported by biology. This is not my intent. I
understand that valorizing childbirth is problematic for women who cannot, or
choose not to, biologically mother.27 Moreover, as a former single mother, I agree
with feminists who have challenged cultural notions that romanticize children
and child rearing.28 I understand that "celebrating our beauty" can lead to capi
talist and commercial exploitation and co-optation. In spite of these limitations,
however, female embodiment is a crucial issue for me, and I identify as a wom

23 Ibid., 11. Oyewumi offers several terms for this expression: in Manding, Badenya; in
Yoruba, Omoya; in Igbo, Nwanne; in Wolof, Doo mi ndey; and in Efik, Eyen-eka.
24 "Mothernity: An African Communitarian Ideology and Ideal" is the title of a section of
Oyewumi's African Women and Feminism. See also 11,5-6.
25 Hudson-Weems, "Self-Naming and Self-Definition," 450.
26 For one critique of African Americans' essentializing of Africa, see Oyewumi, "Alice in
Motherland."
27 See Laurie Lisle, Without Child: Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness (New York:
Routledge, 1999).
28 See Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New
York: Norton, 1995); and Alice Walker, "One Child of One's Own: A Meaningful Digression within
the Work(s)," in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, 361-83.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 107

anist in part because this term offers the best integration of my beliefs about
female agency, embodiment, and spirituality.
In response to Coleman's question, I don't think we all have to be wom
anists. There are alternative terms, and there are new terms that have yet to
emerge. If we choose this term, I believe that we have to think clearly about its
origins and its meaning. Whereas Coleman suggests that womanist may have
outgrown its roots, I respectfully disagree. Womanism was defined by Walker
in the 1980s. Thus, it is an African American concept, and it speaks to African
American concepts of embodiment. It supports diverse spiritual traditions and
is not based in Christianity-and it includes the natural world in its description
of what must be loved and cherished. Although it supports African American
cultural traditions, it also suggests that we must be prepared to question the
authority of our elders. It rejects the homophobic and heterosexist agendas that
still exist within the Black community and the dominant culture. It promulgates
a holistic framework that incorporates cultural, historic, personal, sexual, and
spiritual perspectives, and recognizes individual and collective needs for self
care and healing. I don't know that it was ever intended to be an international
definition. Although I respect the urge that others may have to modify it, I have
problems with those who reject its inclusivity while using it to situate and name
themselves.

RESPONSE
Irene Monroe

Monica A. Coleman's essay is a courageous attempt to expose three in

herent weaknesses in womanist religious scholarship. By raising critical and
constructive questions for both theological and ethical inquiry, Coleman stirs
a body of work that has for too long been uncritical of itself and unreceptive
of different voices inside and outside of its camp. Although all three points in
Coleman's essay are essential and interrelated in depicting these inherent weak
nesses that at present exist in womanist religious scholarship, I will expound
on the heteronormativity of womanist religious scholarship. In so doing, I aim
to demonstrate how the heteronormativity of womanist religious scholarship
excludes queer voices.' I also aim to demonstrate how the heteronormativity
of womanist religious scholarship creates an essentialist construction and ap

1 Queer is an all-embracing, self-referential term that includes sexual and gender minorities
such as lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender, queer, and intersexual people. The letters LGBTQ
are synonymous with queer in my writings, and I often use the two designations interchangeably.
Similarly, in my writings I use the words African American and black interchangeably.

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108 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

plication of this opus of work, thus truncating its growth and compromising its
academic respectability.
As an African American Christian lesbian ordained minister, theologian,
and activist who speaks, writes, and loves unapologetically from this standpoint,
I stand in the womanist religious scholarship camp similarly to the way I do in
the Black Church-as a sister outsider.2 As a sister outsider, I am tangentially
aligned to these communities with the nagging experience of marginalization, if
not complete dispossession.
For me and others like me, being both of African descent and queer cre
ates a distinctive epistemology that shapes not only our identity but also the
distinctive interpretative lens we use to zoom in on the world with regard to
politics, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, issues that contribute to
both the church and the academy. Our method of identifying, or "languaging,"
ourselves as both of African descent and queer is evident in the terms we use,
such as "in the life"-an identifier, a code, that derives from the Harlem Re
naissance. Another is the term "same-gender loving," which became popular
in the African American queer lexicon in the 1990s. Both terms are indeed a
radical pronouncement for LGBTQ people of African descent, because they
are statements about openly engaging in gender expressions and sexual orienta
tions counter to the accepted norm, and about naming this engagement in the
face of virulent homophobia in the Black Church and in African American male
religious scholarship in the academy that could very well cost us our careers, if
not our lives.
Unlike white feminist and African American male religious scholarship
that excludes me because I am black, female, and lesbian, womanist religious
scholarship appeared to offer hope at first. With Alice Walker's second defi
nition of the term explicitly stating that a womanist is "A woman who loves
other women, sexually and/or nonsexually," I felt the excitement of finally par
ticipating in an African American sisterhood organizing across sexualities.3 Also

2 In general usage, "the Black Church" refers to the variety of black Christian churches
in the United States. These congregations, which are often called "storefront churches," are not
officially affiliated with the historical black denominations but are made up of African Ameri
can Christians who worship in traditional black-church style. In formal usage, "the Black Church"
refers to those historical and independent black Protestant denominations that were founded after
the Free African Society in 1787, including the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; the
African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church; the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME)
Church; the National Baptist Convention, USA, (NBC); the National Baptist Convention of Amer
ica (NBCA); the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC); and the Church of God in
Christ (COGIC). Today the distinction between the general usage and formal usage is not discrete
but porous and fluid. Audre Lorde's phrase "sister outsider" depicts the marginalization of African
American lesbians in the black community. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
(Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1984).
3 All references to Walker's definition o? womanist are found in Alice Walker, In Search of
Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi-xii.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 109

I experienced the excitement of engaging in an intellectual collaboration with

African American women in the nascent stages of development of womanist
religious scholarship.
However, as the women in this field grew in numbers, the dominant and
controlling voices in the academy were those of Christian heterosexual women.
Noticing how her voice and visibility in womanist religious scholarship was
becoming marginalized, womanist lesbian theologian Renee Hill stated, "The
lesbian voice is silenced in Christian womanist theology. Heterosexism and
homophobia are nonissues in the Christian womanist paradigm for liberation.
There is no widespread discussion on sexuality in African American Christian
theology in general. Christian womanists, like their male counterparts, focus for
the most part on the impact of racism on the Black community."4
Some womanist Christians would say that the battle in womanist religious
scholarship is not one between heterosexual and lesbian women but rather, as
womanist ethicist Cheryl Sanders argued in 1989, one whose purpose is "to set
forth an authentic representation of Walker's concept in [womanist theological
and ethical thought]."5 This statement came back to bite Sanders, as her trou
bles began in not recognizing and honoring the various ways African American
women had come to use and to share the term, especially with other women of
color.
Although the words religion and Christian do not appear in Walker's defi
nition of womanist, there are both religious and secular usages for the term. It
is, however, in the areas of spirituality and religion that we see the deep chasm
along sexuality lines among African American women, and their various ways of
defining and defending the term womanist that I will expound on.
African American Christian women have used the term womanist to define
and defend their witness to and participation in God's power and presence in
the world. Womanist, in the religious sense, is used primarily by African Ameri
can women who are Christian ministers, seminarians, or feminist scholars in the
field of religion. Womanist Christian thought and practices began to flourish in
the mid-1980s as a way to challenge racist, sexist, and white feminists' religious
practices and discourses that excluded African American women's participa
tion and experiences in church and society. For womanist Christian ministers
and seminarians, Walker's definition serves as a springboard for their preach
ing style, liturgy, and pastoral ministry. For womanist Christian academicians,
the definition shapes and frames their analytical and theoretical approaches. By
using African American women's experiences of struggle and survival as their

4 Ren?e L. Hill, "Who Are We for Each Other? Sexism, Sexuality, and Womanist Theology,"
in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 2nd ed., vol. 2,1980-1992, ed. James H. Cone and
Gayraud S. Wilmore (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 346.
5 Cheryl J. Sanders, "Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective," Journal of
Feminist Studies in Religion 5, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 85.

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 110 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

starting point for inquiry, these clergywomen and scholars examine the simulta
neous forces of race, class, and gender oppression in African American women's
lives. A womanist approach also celebrates African American women's religious
history and validates their theological beliefs.
However, many African American women who practice various forms of
womanist spirituality argue that Christian womanists not only have desecrated
Walker's meaning, practice, and intent of the word but also have reinscribed
the institutional fetters that come with any organized religion and its many con
comitant "isms," including heterosexism. Walker emphasizes African American
women's love for the Spirit in the term womanist. The guiding principles of a
womanist spirituality are the interconnections and intersections of all oppres
sions. Therefore, justice making within the context of womanist spirituality is
birthing spiritual communities of women of color on the margins, at home, and
abroad who oppose the suppression of women's spirituality and sexualities that
institutionalized religions foster in both creed and doctrine. A womanist spiri
tuality knows that spirituality and sexuality are inextricably connected and that
"[loving] other women, sexually and/or nonsexually" is one of the paths a woman
might take to become liberated and enlightened to self-knowledge.
In an interview with her biographer Evelyn White,6 Walker shared her
views about her own liberation from patriarchal repression of female sexuality
and bonding between women:

I think the process started with wanting myself. Women have to

understand that regardless of who does not want us, we have to want
ourselves. Then we can begin to see and appreciate other women and
the amazing possibilities of self-love and acceptance we can find in our
union with each other. We can sit back and wait for men to love us until
we are blue in the face, but since I loved women already, I decided, why
wait?
There is also a place of humility that comes from really understand
ing that we have all entered this plane through the legs of a woman. And
that it is a holy place. My love of women intensified during all those
years I researched female genital mutilation and thought about women
holding down other women and girls to destroy that holy and profoundly
sacred temple.7

Walker's best seller The Color Purple is the first of her novels embodying
the guiding principles of a womanist spirituality. The novel centers primarily on
the life of Celie, the protagonist, who is a young African American incest survi
vor plagued by the multiple oppressions of race, class, gender, sexual orienta

6 Evelyn C. White, Alice Walker: A Life (New York: Norton, 2004).

7 Alice Walker, "Alice Walker: On Finding Your Bliss," interview by Evelyn C. White, Reading
GroupGuides.com, http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/by_the_light_of_my_fathers_
smile-author.asp. Reprinted from Ms., September-October 1999.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 111

tion, and organized religion. With the help of strong African American women
in her community, including a character named Shug Avery, Celie becomes
one who "Appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibil
ity ... and women's strength," to return to Walker's definition of a womanist. In
so doing, Celie becomes empowered as a woman who "Loves herself. Regard
less" (again quoting Walker), resulting from her newfound spirituality and lib
erated sexuality. The deconstruction of black male heteropatriarchal religions,
and by extension all organized religions, in The Color Purple was brought to the
academy's attention by womanist theologian Delores Williams. Williams points
out that Celie's understanding of God and her interpretation of the Bible are
the factors that have allowed Celie to participate in her own oppression:

Nobody had paid attention to Alice Walker's portrayal of the protagonist

Celie's understanding of God's relation to her life.
This oversight is significant because the portrayal communicates
some of Walker's most significant messages about black women's op
pression and liberation. Celie's initial notion of God shows us that black
Christian women often support their own victimization when they cling
to traditional ideas about God. Shug Avery helps Celie transform her
understanding of God, and we become aware that black women must
arrive at notions of God which accommodate their struggle for libera
tion as women.8

Given the body of work by Walker, Williams, Kelly Brown Douglas,9 and
others, why have many Christian womanist scholars fallen prey to the beliefs
and practices of black heteropatriarchal religions, the very things they have dog
gedly tried to expunge from their lives in order to attain both personal and
ecclesiastical liberation?
I posit that the problem with some Christian womanists derives not so
much from the fact that they are in the church and/or the academy as from the
fact that their own deep-seated internalized heterosexist beliefs and practices
make them black churchmen and theologians "in drag."'0 As "drag kings," they
disassociate themselves from their female center-Eros and Spirit-to don, in
token moments, their usually highly respected, visible, and vital positions within
these heteropatriarchal institutions. And it starts with these patriarchal women
in both the church and the academy maintaining the status quo by policing
queer behaviors.
It must be noted that not all Christian womanists are homophobic and het

8 Delores S. Williams, "The Color Purple," Christianity and Crisis, July 14,1986, 230.
9 Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Mary
knoll, NY: Orbis, 1999).
10 "In drag" is an idiom in the queer lexicon referring to cross-dressing, wearing clothes nor
mally worn by the opposite sex. Female-bodied or female-identified persons who temporarily at
tempt to pass as men are referred to as "drag kings."

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112 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

erosexist, and some do welcome a black sisterhood across different sexual orien
tations, theological beliefs, and practices, as well as disciplines. Nevertheless, it
is the policing of womanist religious scholarship "to set forth an authentic repre
sentation of Walker's concept in that work," as Sanders put it, that first created a
divided sisterhood and a heteronormative representation of it. The warring ten
sions concerning various sexualities of African American Christian women who
first shaped and informed the scholarship made Sanders query what constitutes
an authentic representation of Walker's term womanist:

In the first instance womanist carries the connotation of black lesbian,

and in the second it denotes black feminist, a designation that includes
women who love women and those who love men.... On what grounds,
if any, can womanist authority and authenticity be established in our
work? In other words, what is the necessary and sufficient condition for
doing womanist scholarship? To be a black woman? A black feminist?
A black lesbian?"

Although Sanders, in my opinion, sets up the heteronormative paradigm

in womanist religious scholarship, she does not maintain it by herself. Christian
womanist scholars and ministers who are lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and
queer do also. When these Christian womanist scholars do not openly write,
teach, and preach from their social locations, they too silence LGBTQ voices
by maintaining a tacit "don't ask, don't tell" policy.'2 Despite their appending
heterosexism to their litanies of interrelated oppressions in their writings and
homilies, cheering from the sidelines us openly African American LGBTQ
scholars, they collude with the status quo, because our queer voices become
subsumed by a heteronormative universality that renders us not only invisible
but also speechless.
The policing of womanist religious scholarship points not to one Christian
womanist but to all who heard my, Hill's, and others' concerns and laments
about the heteronormativity of womanist religious scholarship and yet did noth
ing to create a multidialogical context to talk, pray, and worship with African
American women across our many diverse identities and sexualities both in
side and outside of the church and the academy. Also, along with the policing
of womanist religious scholarship has emerged an essentialist construction and
application of the work. This essentialism has created dichotomies among Afri
can American women and others between who's in and who's out of the sister
hood, thus ghettoizing womanist religious scholarship and truncating its field of

11 Sanders, "Christian Ethics and Theology," 85.

12 In general, "don't ask, don't tell" describes any instance in which a person must keep his or
her sexual orientation and any related attributes a secret. It is the common description of the cur
rent military policy that prohibits anyone who engages in homosexual conduct from serving in the
armed forces of the United States.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 113

scholarship. The didactic intent of womanist religious scholarship should be to

offer to everyone various heuristic models of analyses and methodologies that
would encourage others to do justice-making work in the church, society, and
academy.
Furthermore, womanist religious scholarship and scholars collude with the
Black Church. Many espouse in their scholarship a liberationist praxis, yet their
praxes are devoid of action to address the plight of the damned, disinherited,
dispossessed, and disrespected when it comes to LGBTQ parishioners, col
leagues, and students and the AIDS crisis ravaging our communities. Active,
churched womanist liberationist scholars do not challenge themselves, their
churches, or ministers who applaud African American LGBTQ people in the
choir pews yet excoriate us from the pulpits. Our connections and contributions
to the larger black religious cosmos are desecrated every time homophobic pro
nouncements go unchecked in these holy places of worship. And, because of
the Black Church's theological qualifier to love the "sinners" (us) but to hate the
"sin" (our sexual orientation), we are permanent souls of the Black Church but
we are never fully permanent souls in it. Consequently, some of us not only have
left the church but also have abandoned our individual and collective hopes that
womanist religious scholarship will lead the way.

RESPONSE
Debra Mubashshir Majeed

Some might argue that Monica Coleman's "Must I be womanist?" repre

sents the ideological concerns of a young, thoughtful scholar who expected the
shoulders of her mentors to be strong and broad enough to both carry her to
her destiny and shield her destiny for her until she met it. In other words, Cole
man appears to cast herself-and other "third-wave" womanists, like me-as
both benefactor and victim, both a daughter and a granddaughter of a move
ment whose subversive agency has been both inspired and handcuffed by trail
blazers who spoke the truth, but not audibly enough, not persuasively enough,
not often enough, and not completely enough to clarify the meaning of "wom
anism" for succeeding generations. Speaking of the work of those "passionate
people of faith" who encouragingly "mentored and "mothered" her, Coleman
declares, "I've been dissatisfied by the heteronormativity of womanist religious
scholarship." From the outset, she acknowledges the intellectual minefield she
has entered as well as the utmost respect with which her questioning begins.
Still, she chastises her mentors for not removing the guesswork, for leaving
her with questions about her intellectual and activist identity that she does not
want. For me, the question isn't whether her theorizing is accurate. Instead I

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 114 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

wonder, does she alone harbor perceptions about the utility of the womanist
legacy for non-Christian women attempting to name themselves from within
the boundaries of womanist thought, or has the Christology of the Western
womanist agenda rendered other religious traditions so invisible that non
Christian women may live more authentically outside of-and perhaps far away
from-the womanist camp?
In 1994, I faced a similar intellectual dilemma; I wanted someone else to
reduce my options for me, too. Thankfully, Jacquelyn Grant refused to do so.
In that year, she traveled to Pasadena, California, from Atlanta, Georgia, to
present a public lecture on her groundbreaking work White Women's Christ
and Black Women's Jesus.' I was a second-career master of divinity student at
Fuller-Evangelical Theological Seminary, contemplating my field of study for
a doctoral degree. With the aid of event coordinator and good friend Aleese
Moore, I was able to spend a few private moments with Grant prior to her de
parture. She agreed to meet me in a nearby hotel lobby.
I was intimidated by Grant (and, for that matter, by Katie Cannon, Emi
lie Townes, and Renita Weems too). So I arrived early-or so I had intended.
However, I found that Grant was already seated, in a rich, oversized bamboo
chair that resembled more a throne than seating for the dispensation of career
advice. I knew our time was short, so I was direct. I shared the short version of
my life's journey and interests and then asked, "So what can I study?" Without a
blink, and in her usual authoritative voice, Grant replied, "What do you want to
study?" After losing a couple of rounds of this form of conversational volleying,
I declared, "You mean there's no list from which I am to pick?"
I walked away feeling naive, dejected, and enormously wasteful of Grant's
time. The idea that one could (or should at least attempt to) connect her semi
nary training to her passion had never occurred to me. I expected Grant to help
me choose the shape of my doctoral work, based upon her wisdom concerning
the academy and her knowledge of what was acceptable for an African American
clergywoman to study. Instead, she refused to overlook my intellectual interests
or to support any attempt of mine to remain within the ideological boundaries
others tried to draw around African American female scholars. On that won
derfully sunny California afternoon, Grant challenged me to recognize that I
had options even she could not circumscribe. She knew full well that I might
endure nights of intellectual and spiritual jihad on the path to realizing that I
should craft a dissertation project bearing some resemblance to my personal
aspirations rather than limit my advanced studies solely to someone else's pre
determined categories. (In this context I use the Arabic term jihad to connote
internal struggle for personal improvement and community betterment, not the
popular-and misleading-understanding of "holy war.") I am convinced, as

1 Jacquelyn Grant, White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology
and Womanist Response, A AR Academy Series 64 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 115

well, that Grant and her trailblazing peers never intended the "womanist" con
cept to remain a fixed identity to whose bones only they could give flesh. I be
lieve Grant knew that the young scholar meeting with her might one day choose
to assert her own identity and agency by reframing the guidelines established by
these pioneering womanist scholars and/or by creating an ideological lens that
would more clearly celebrate multiple and diverse positions of belonging.2
In fact, in 1999, Katie Cannon helped concretize my belief that early wom
anists didn't intend the concept to remain fixed, during a break in a Woman
ist Approaches to the Study of Religion session at the annual meeting of the
American Academy of Religion (AAR), in Boston, Massachusetts. By then I
was a Muslim-having made my transition to Islam the year before-and a
regular session attendee. By then I had also grown weary of a womanist agenda
that routinely made normative the Christian experience of African American
women.3
On some level, trailblazing womanist scholars contributed to their own
denial of self-as understood in relation to the whole-as much as they rein
scribed the marginalization that African American Muslim women also confront
by consciously or unconsciously engaging in external colonialism, a system that
creates a hierarchy of black religious expression; negates non-Christian tradi
tions, especially Islam; and questions the moral agency of Muslim women as
spiritual and social witnesses. Such a system also can relegate African Ameri
can Muslim women to the perceived role of "subject without agency."4 More
over, perhaps the historic absence of articulated Muslim perspectives within
womanist conversations in the academy has provided an excuse or rationale for
disassociation on the part of some Muslims scholars who feel more comfort
able within traditional disciplines such as Islamic studies, where their religious
knowledge, experience, and expression may be more overtly validated. When
Emilie Townes writes, for example, "The spirituality that issues from Black
women's lives is found in the moral wisdom of African women," her theorizing
is guided by a Christian orientation of the Creator and the Creator's relation
ship to humanity, an orientation that rarely differentiates the faith experiences
of black Christian women and other African American women.5

2 miriam cooke considers the issue of "multiple belongings" as part of her rationale for the
utility of Islamic feminism. See miriam cooke, "Multiple Critique: Islamic Feminist Rhetorical
Strategies," in Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse, ed. Laura E. Donaldson and
Kwok Pui-Lan (New York: Routledge, 2001), 142-60.
3 Womanist scholar Cynthia S'thembile West provided one of the few exceptions to the prac
tice. See "Revisiting Female Activism in the 1960s: The Newark Branch Nation of Islam," Black
Scholar 26, nos. 3-4 (1996).
4 Amina Wadud, Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspec
tive (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), xi.
5 Emilie M. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nash
ville: Abingdon, 1995), 11.

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116 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Arguably, most African Americans self-identify as Christians. Their alle

giance supports the "natural" tendency in black America and the academy to
speak of African American religion and mean Christianity. Thankfully, Townes,
like many other womanist scholars, is keenly aware of the methodological ten
sions that arise when christocentric language and/or symbols are employed uni
versally to speak of worship, the Creator, devotion, Spirit, and love, regardless
of audience. Like several of her contemporaries, Townes wrestles with the re
sulting disequilibrium and collaborates with non-Christian scholars in drawing
attention to changing perspectives and the varieties of womanist discourses on
African American women.
Even so, at the 1999 AAR panel I felt, to some extent, that I was witnessing
external colonialism at the hands of womanists. It was clear that the contribu
tions of Muslim scholars, such as Aminah McCloud and Amina Wadud (the
pioneering generational peers of Grant and others), needed to be cited and ad
dressed.6 So, in true womanish fashion, I shared my discomfort with Cannon, at
the time a member of the Womanist Approaches steering committee. In wom
anist Cannonese, her response went something like this: "Well, Debra. You're
right, we are missing the Islamic perspective, but few of us know anything about
Islam. It would be great to have Muslim scholars share their stories." In other
words, "Soon-to-be-Dr. Debra, when will you submit a proposal?" Cannon's
challenge inspired a Womanist Approaches-sponsored panel at the 2000 AAR
annual conference, in Nashville, Tennessee, which drew attention to womanist
spirituality and social activism in the lives of African American Muslim women.
She also compelled me to consider designing a framework, Muslim womanist
philosophy, that presupposes the primacy of Islam in the historical experience
of some African American women at the same time that it critiques both the
ascribed and achieved identity of African American Muslim women.
For decades, white women have presumed to speak about black women in
their discourses about gender, black men have claimed to include black women
in their treatises about race, and feminist and immigrant Muslims have perpet
uated stereotypes that imprison African American Muslims beneath a veil. In
like manner, the teaching and research of most Western womanist scholars have
often been trapped in a christological centrality that confines the totality of Af

6 Wadud's Quran and Woman deftly articulates the intellectual and social benefits of a
woman-centered reading of the single most sacred scripture to Muslims. Aminah McCloud, author
of African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Islamic studies scholar at DePaul
University, served as the pr?sider for the Afro-American Religious History Group panel, whose
theme was "The Legacy of C. Eric Lincoln and the Study of Islam in North America," at the 2004
annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, in San Antonio, Texas. Among the panelists
was Muslim scholar Jamillah Karim, then a doctoral student at Duke University, who presented her
research on Muslim women in Atlanta. Their presence marked the rare occasion up to that time
when Islam had been the focal point of a session of the Afro-American Religious History Group.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 117

rican American religiosity within the boundaries of Western Christianity.7 Nev

ertheless, the embodied curiosity and motherly empowerment of these early
womanists, coupled with the religious void of Western womanist thought and
my own activist odyssey of faith, fueled my efforts to situate the lived realities of
African American Muslim women squarely within a womanist framework that
spoke to their African ancestry, their American citizenship, and their Islamic
faith. The result: Muslim womanist philosophy.
Muslim womanist philosophy is a perspective created to reclaim, enhance,
and produce thoughtful explorations of African American Muslim life. It pro
vides an opportunity to study Islam and explore the realities of Muslim life
through the experiences of African American Muslim women. It also responds
to the tendency of the Western womanist agenda to render Muslim women
voiceless and invisible. The method responds to the racist and patriarchal cul
ture of the United States and is grounded in the nuances of black struggles for
survival, in quests for Islamic legitimacy, and in the social activism of African
American Muslim women.
Similar to its more established ideological sibling, womanist theology, Mus
lim womanist philosophy is an emerging field of religious, cultural, theological,
and ethical reflection in which "the historic and present-day insights of African
American women are brought into critical conversation" with Muslim traditions
and the teachings of Islam.8 This interpretive framework challenges Muslim
women, scholars, and others to speak holistically about Islam and the diverse
experiences of its female adherents, and to distinguish one's faithfulness to the
Qur'an-both as divine discourse and as text interpreted in time and space.9 In
other words, the chief concern of Muslim womanist philosophy is to accomplish
for Muslim women what Katie Cannon and other womanists have endeavored
to achieve for their Christian sisters: the documentation of the agency and moral
formulas African American Muslim women construct and pass on to succeeding
generations from within the social conditions of membership in both a racial
class and a religious group that are marginalized in the United States. Muslim

7 Protestantism has been the type of Christianity most often privileged. Exceptions can
be found in the contributions of my former dissertation advisor, Toinette Eugene; M. Shawn
Copeland; and Jamie Phelps, among others. See, for example, Toinette Eugene, "Dealing with
Diversity: Confessions, Convictions, and Commitments," Open Hands 11, no. 3 (Winter 1996);
M. Shawn Copeland and Elisabeth Sch?ssler Fiorenza, eds., Feminist Theology in Different Con
texts (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996); and Jamie Phelps, Black and Catholic: The Challenge and Gift
of Black Folk: Contributions of African American Experience and Thought to Catholic Theology
(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997).
8 This rationale for the inclusion of African American women's experience is quoted from a
description of the pioneering womanist scholarship of Emilie Townes, "Scholar of Womanist The
ology and Expert on Preaching to Join Divinity Faculty," Yale Bulletin and Calendar, May 6,2005,
1, http://www.yale.edu/opa/v33.n28/story7.html.
9 See Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans, and ed. John B. Thomp
son (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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 118 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

womanist philosophy situates itself under the banner of global womanism rather
than the narrower one of Western womanism. Inherent in the development of
Muslim womanist philosophy is the awareness that those who choose it as a tool
are not necessarily bound by other determined territorialities. That is, for this
scholar, global womanism provides the "symbolic capital" for the construction
of what others might characterize as "contradictory rhetorical space."'0
To me, the broader womanist agenda is a natural root for the emergence
of a distinct trunk dedicated to the study of African American Muslim women.
For, since its emergence in North America in the 1980s, womanist thought
has produced an interdisciplinary array of literature focused on multiple forms
and dimensions of the lived realities of African American women. Those who
have identified themselves as womanists as well as those upon whose work the
label has been imposed have often thought transnationally while living locally,
fully aware that the agency to name and position themselves was their own to
exercise.
This response began with the question, Is Coleman alone in wondering
whether the Christology of the Western womanist agenda has rendered other
religious traditions so invisible that non-Christian women may live more au
thentically outside of-and perhaps far away from-the womanist camp? Sur
prisingly, her twenty-first-century concerns make an interesting contrast to the
arguments of Cheryl Sanders, who in 1989 doubted the utility of the term wom
anist for her Christian sisters, given its "secular" roots." Obviously, theorizing
about the territory of the womanist agenda continues, as does the drawing of
new borders and fundamental categories. In this regard, Coleman is not alone;
she has much esteemed company, as long as that company views womanism in
its broadest terms. Moreover, when Toinette Eugene boldly cautioned white
feminists against "description and prescription" in 1992, it is likely that her fel
low womanists took note as well.12 Rather than feeling dismayed, I celebrate
with Coleman the fact that we have much room to maneuver in determining
our own position and naming whether we choose to remain within or without
the womanist agenda. In that, I believe, our Westeru womanist ancestors have
bequeathed us a legacy whose full power and reach have yet to be experienced
and yet to be witnessed.

10 cooke, "Multiple Critique."

11 See Cheryl J. Sanders's contribution to the roundtable discussion "Christian Ethics and
Theology in Womanist Perspective," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5, no. 2 (Summer
1989): 83-112.
12 Toinette Eugene, "On 'Difference' and the Dream of Pluralist Feminism,"/owrn?/ of Fem
inist Studies in Religion 8 (Fall 1992), cited in Gloria L. Schabb, "Feminist Theological Methodol
ogy: Towards a Kaleidoscopic Model," Theological Studies 62 (2001).

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 119

RESPONSE
Lee Miena Skye

This is an Australian Indigenous Christian womanist theological reply to

Coleman's soul-searching concerning the "womanist" scholastic label. The data
I cite are found in my master's and PhD theses, where Australian Indigenous
women's Christian theologies/spiritualities are documented for the first time
in academic history.' I am a Tasmanian Aboriginal (a Palawa), descended from
the last "full blood" before the genocide. The annihilation of my people was
one of the swiftest acts of genocide in the history of humankind, and I seemed
destined to write against what I call quadridimensional oppression, that is, rac
ism, classism, sexism, and naturism (abuse of nature). Of my people there are
approximately five thousand descendants, who keep the culture and language
alive in spirit. Palawa womanist theology/spirituality is part of the data used in
the theses, along with data from the Murri, Nunga, and Koori peoples, who are
from mainland Australia. Even though Palawas are a unique Indigenous race
(its racial linkage is uncertain), our country recognizes all Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander peoples as the Indigenous peoples of Australia. It is important
to understand that our mainland Indigenous race is in genocide, and the same
fate my people have met is facing all Australian Aboriginals. My work is urgently
needed to aid in healing and reconciliation.

Who We Are as Womanists

In choosing the right language to educate others about who we are, to use
the name "black feminist" insinuates that sexism is the central oppression in our
existence. This is certainly not the case; racism is our central concern. There
fore, the name "womanist" is more appropriate, because it indicates there is
more to our life reality than the issues of feminism. Also, as theologians we are
tiddas (sisters) who are in solidarity with our black, colored, and white sisters
around the world. To state merely that we are black does not indicate clearly
that we embrace the diverse suffering of our sisters from other races.
In addition, a certain number of our women, especially those more closely
connected to traditional culture, are afraid of the name "feminist." For them it
undermines culture. They have a relationship with their men based on partner

1 Lee Miena Skye, "Kerygmatics of the New Millennium: A Study of Australian Aboriginal
Women's Christology" (master's thesis, University of South Australia, Adelaide, 1999; also forth
coming from ISPCK [Delhi]); Lee Miena Skye, "Yiminga (Spirit) Calling: A Study of Australian
Aboriginal Christian Women's Creation Theology" (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2004). Spe
cific chapters from these theses are cited in subsequent notes.

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 120 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

ship, which one could call their own type of feminism.2 Men and women both
have their sacred, secret women's and men's businesses. Each is vital to keeping
the universe in balance. The women do not feel oppression to the degree that
white Western feminists do, because they have their own sacred space.
There are those of our urban women who are afraid of the name "feminist"
because, to them, it seems to imply being in competition with and critical of
their men. They find this too difficult when their men suffer racism. To be in
competition with them would perpetuate white Western male behavior. They
are second-rate men in a hegemonic white male society, and the women are
sympathetic, preferring to uplift and encourage their men.3 Hence, the women
gravitate more to the name "womanist," because it focuses on the oppressions
of racism and imperialism.
Racism can be seen as Australian Indigenous women's greatest suffering,
because they share this pain with their men, children, and community. Sexism,
by contrast, is a more private pain, gender-oriented and not directly shared by
all the community. Australian Indigenous women are the least in otur society;
therefore, classism is both personal and social suffering.4 Moreover, the closer
the women are connected to traditional culture, to nature, the more they are
devastated by naturism; it is indeed a community suffering.
The name "black feminist" does not convey the depth of our pain as
a people. The name "womanist" allows us to engage more deeply the multi
dimensional suffering of Indigenous women and peoples around the world who
stand against the oppressions that are the product of colonialism and neocolo
nialism. This is why, as an Australian Aboriginal womanist, I would define as
womanist any Indigenous, black, or colored woman who fights the oppressions
of colonialism and neocolonialism.5 From my extended reading of scholastic
womanist theological and nontheological writings, I can say that all womanists
are engaged directly or indirectly in standing against the effects of colonialism
and neocolonialism.
As womanist theologians, tiddas theologians, we accuse the state and the
church of quadridimensional oppression, racism, sexism (heterosexism is im
plicit), classism, and naturism. From my readings, I perceive that this activity
is in harmony with the universal womanist theological academic tradition, in its
critique of both church and state of the tridimensional oppression of racism,

2 See "Discovering Our Wonder: The Distinctiveness of Australian Aboriginal Women's

Christologies," chap. 3 in "Kerygmatics," 42; and "The Invaluable Contribution Australian Ab
original Christian Women Make to Creation Theology," chap. 6 in "Yiminga," 319.
3 "Discovering Our Wonder," 46; "The Recognition of Australian Aboriginal Christian
Women as Spiritual and (Eco)Womanist Tiddas Theologians," chap. 4 in "Yiminga," 225.
4 "The Pursuing Paradox: How Christology Came to Australian Aboriginal Women," chap. 1
in "Kerygmatics," 2; "Invaluable Contribution," 300-309.
5 "Discovering Our Wonder." Anne Pattel-Gray, an Australian Aboriginal liberation theolo
gian, shares in this perspective throughout her writings; see Skye, "Recognition."

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 121

sexism, and classism. For many of us so closely connected to the land, natur
ism is an additional, immediate suffering.6 To contain and express this suffering
only within the academic area of ecowomanist theology would be to compart
mentalize and to put us in a place that limits the full expression of our everyday
reality.

Third-Wave Womanism Must Bring About Full Healing

One could say that, within the universal context of womanist theology,
Australian Indigenous women are between first- and second-wave womanism.
We have had the nurturing of international womanist and womanist theological
writers to encourage us to articulate our pain, but we are really only just begin
ning to do this. There are some Australian Indigenous women, however, espe
cially in the younger generation, who can accept Aboriginal spirituality/theology
but not Christianity. Therefore, womanist theology, as an academic area, does
not allow them to pursue their search for religious freedom and identity. These
women have to be catered to, and their human rights of religious freedom and
the pursuit of wholeness must be respected. Thus, third-wave womanism must
bring about healingfor all our women. We have begun our first stage, but, as it
seems the healing of all our women is in two stages, our second stage must be
through third-wave womanism to be complete.

Non-Christian Womanist Theology as a New Academic Tradition

We Indigenous Christian womanist theologians, writing within the uni
versal academic tradition of womanist theology against abuses of both church
and state, are doing so out of our own experience, which, from my reading of
feminist and womanist theological and nontheological works, seems to me is
fundamental. We cannot write from the experience of others; we can only be
in sympathy with their experience and encourage the articulation of their pain
and healing. Also fundamental to the universal womanist theological academic
tradition is the search for wholeness. This is always contextual. Therefore, we
cannot write for the wholeness of others whose context is different from ours,
be it a cultural, spiritual, social, political, sexual, economic, or gendered context.
We can only respect, sympathize, and support them; to do otherwise would be
arrogant.
In light of both of these intrinsic functions of womanist theology, there is

6 "We Need to Be Whole: Is There Room for New Christologies?" chap. 4 in "Kerygmat
ics," 58-66; "Visiting Kumarangk: The Legacy of Christian and Secular Colonialist Imperialism
Epitomized; A Case Study," chap. 5 in "Yiminga," 268-99. The latter is a case study of the ef
fects of racism, classism, sexism, and, in particular, naturism on the Ngarrindjeri women in South
Australia.

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 122 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

a call for a new academic womanist theological tradition that is non-Christian,

to embrace the spiritual healing needs of third-wave womanists. For Australian
Indigenous women, this tradition will develop, initially and most importantly,
by embracing traditional Aboriginal religions and spiritualities that are non
Christian. The importance of this cannot be overemphasized, as culture arises
from such traditions, and the practice of their beliefs cements identity. Vital to
the healing of our people is the establishment of racial identity. As I stress in
both of my theses, racial ontology (one's racial way of being in the world) is car
ried in the genes.7 Because of this, the road to wholeness cannot possibly begin
until racial identity is established.
There is also a need for our women to tackle the hegemonic presence of
heterosexism in church and state and in womanist theological discourse, to cre
ate space within the academic and social worlds for the articulation of pain and
the healing of lesbian women. As womanists, we uphold our men and children
in the healing process so that they will be embraced in their struggles with
homosexuality.
The field research for my PhD thesis shows that heterosexism is a white
Western phenomenon; our people in traditional cultures do not make an issue
of homosexuality.8 If any of our people are understood to be homosexual, they
are not ostracized from the community or made to feel inferior. They are treated
as precious like any other community member. There is a lack of discussion of
homosexuality among our people, simply because it is not an issue.
As I have pointed out, embracing culture is imperative to the healing of our
women. This is also important in dealing with the other two aspects of quadridi
mensional oppression. Classism is another white Western creation that divides
and ostracizes people. Once Australian Indigenous women embrace their cul
ture, they will engage in an egalitarian social structure that is devoid of class hi
erarchy.9 Naturism is also a phenomenon that, for our people, is distinctly white
Westeru. Our cultures have a relationship with the land that is intimate and
immediate: our people claim that the land owns them.'0 Therefore, to embrace
culture is to embrace guardianship of nature.
Australian Indigenous non-Christian womanist theologians, our third-wave
womanists, will find and direct healing for themselves and others through the
embracing of culture and the creation of space within academic and social insti
tutions for the expression and healing of suffering. Coleman is correct in high

7 "Pursuing Paradox," 16-17; "Set the Spirit Free: The Need for an Australian Aboriginal
Christian Womanist Research Methodology," chap. 2 in "Yiminga," 79-82.
8 "Invaluable Contribution," 314.
9 "Pursuing Paradox," 16, 42; "Witnessing the Inculturation: Data Report and Analysis,"
chap. 3 in "Yiminga," 161.
10 "We Need to Be Whole," 58-59; "Recognition," 217-18; "Visiting Kumarangk"; "Invalu
able Contribution," 332.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 123

lighting the necessity for the healing of all black and colored women. I hope my
suggestions for the formation of a new academic tradition will help third-wave
womanists find the freedom and wholeness they so desire. It is essential that
this be so, with non-Christian womanist theology established as a legitimate
body of thought. Although they will still have the same struggles we have had
as second-wave womanists, they can be assured that, just as we were supported,
encouraged, and nurtured by our forebears-our feminist and womanist moth
ers and sisters in spirit-so it will be for them.

Conclusion
Coleman's thoughts have challenged me to consider in more depth the
healing needs of all Australian Aboriginal women, something I have been mean
ing to do for some time. Third-wave womanism can be the next stage in their
healing process, and such womanists and womanist theologians are called to
create healing space within academic and nonacademic society to meet their
needs and human rights. Supporting second-wave womanists-uplifting our sis
ters into wholeness-is inherent in their endeavors. The search for wholeness
is intrinsic to womanism, and this next wave of womanists must continue the
search for themselves and the generations that are to come.

RESPONSE
Stephanie Y Mitchem

I am grateful to Monica Coleman for her article, because she raises the
lingering questions of black women's academic and intellectual identities. Her
questions bring me to moments of reflection and analysis, including a closer
look at myself, my professional path, and the "state" of academe. What follows is
a theological reflection inspired by Coleman's question, "Must I be womanist?"
I did not come to academe by way of my initial undergraduate experiences.
In fact, in the 1970s I dropped out of a public college in Michigan that had
improved racism to a fine art. I moved away from the academic and was com
mitted to leading an activist life, sometimes in church settings, sometimes not.
At different times, I was involved in providing counseling and community edu
cation. Slowly, I moved to the administrative side, such as managing grants and
performing political advocacy.
The time came, however, when I went back to academe. It was, now that
I think about it, a natural progression. How could I integrate different areas
of my life while continuing to grow? What had I learned from my activist life?
How could I lend a greater weight of authority to my words?

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 124 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Yet, I did not return to the academy expecting a perfect world, one without
conflict. Further, with my activist mind-set, my eyes were open to see areas of
contention and weakness and to act as an agent of change when possible. So
I am baffled when I read Coleman's words, as a representative of third-wave
feminists, with questions about the status quo and the efficiency of their prede
cessors. What did she and third wavers expect to find in the academic world?
But I get ahead of myself here.
There were points throughout my returning undergraduate and later
master's-level studies, in the 1980s, when I encountered professors who did not
know of any black women who wrote in any religious field. But they knew of
many white American women writing about everything. I read many of these
white women's books with dismay when the words did not wrap around my
black, working-class woman's experiences, often resonating with the question
attributed to Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a woman?" The professors' ignorance
shaped my future studies, lending a new passion to my desire to end, specifi
cally, the silencing of black women on too many levels of academe and, gener
ally, the rejection of black scholarship's legitimacy.
During my doctoral work, I was able to blend religious studies with anthro
pology, ethnography, American history, and ethics in order to explore the reli
giosity of black women. Womanist thought was the arena to which I gravitated
with my disciplinary base in theology. Womanist thought was also the arena in
which my activist mind could identify continuing ways to engage other black
women. Yet when I work with black women in other disciplines-particularly
history, sociology, or anthropology-I use the term "black feminist" to describe
my approach. This is strategic, as the black women scholars in these disciplines
understand their work under the name black feminism. These black feminists
are the ones from whom I learn.
I do not find such usage of different terms a form of doublethink; I do not
experience any kind of cognitive dissonance. Instead, I understand womanist
and black feminist thought to fall along a continuum following the ideas of cul
tural theorist and black feminist Joy James: "To some degree then, we can distin
guish between a conventional feminism embraceable by all progressive women,
including those who happen to be black, and a black feminism or womanism,
one particular to women of African descent."' James's view defines feminism,
black feminism, and womanism in nonconflictual terms. It is not necessary, with
such an understanding, to anguish over whether one is black feminist or wom
anist or generic feminist. Frankly, ranges of intellectual stances are found within
each grouping. This diversity of women's voices is welcome to me; I am afraid
of any group of people parroting the same phrases with the same inflections.
(The idea that such a firm unanimity can exist reminds me of my African Ameri

1 Joy James, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (New York: St. Mar
tin's, 1999), 11-12.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 125

can undergraduate students' futile search for mythical black community "unity"
across ages, regions, education, status, or political views.) Every scholar drags
past and future baggage into the academy; why should black women be exempt
from this aspect of humanity?
I view each of these groups-womanist, feminist, black feminist-as re
lated, cousins rather than strangers. The possibilities that derive from recog
nizing the relationships between the types demand that we start to act like a
functional, responsible family instead of a dysfunctional group that immolates
itself in the name of politics. We are interrelated in organic ways, growing from
each other's struggles, being birthed again and again as we encounter new ideas
and respond to actions from others in the family.
But is not this fictive kinship really larger than those few of us in the acad
emy? Aren't we involved in our work for objectives larger than inflating our own
egos? The African American women with whom I speak outside the academic
world generally have no interest in black feminism. It is not that they have
no interest in justice. These women often hold highly sophisticated analyses
of injustice from the grassroots level. Their intellectual acuity is celebrated in
the works of a range of noted authors, including Zora Neale Hurston and Alice
Walker. The type of womanist work with black women's religious wisdom that
honors and addresses their realities is exemplified by ethicist Toinette Eugene's
exploration of the value-laden, homegrown "mama saids"; biblical scholar Re
nita Weems's exploration of biblical themes from a womanist view; and Emilie
Townes's exploration of the richness of black women's spirituality.2
Further, black women religious scholars are not constrained to publish
only about womanist thought and ideas, even when they have previously writ
ten about or been involved in womanist work. Some recently published texts
provide examples of the broad scope of such scholars: Damise C. Martin's Be
yond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church (2005), Kelly
Brown Douglas's What's Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies/Christian Souls
(2005), and Barbara Holmes's Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the
Black Church (2004).3 The possibilities may be wider than Coleman can see at
this time.
Nonetheless, black feminism generally continues to represent an elitist
world speaking a foreign language for many black women outside the acad

2 Toinette M. Eugene, "Regardless: An Attitude of Being for Women under Fire," Update:
Newsletter of the Evangelical and Ecumenical Women's Caucus 14, no. 3 (Winter 1990/91): 24;
Renita J. Weems, Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women's Relationships in the Bible
(San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988); Emilie M. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as
SocialWitness (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995).
3 Darnise C. Martin, Beyond Christianity: African Americans in a New Thought Church
(New York: New York University Press, 2005); Kelly Brown Douglas, What's Faith Got to Do with
It? Black Bodies /Christian Souls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005); and Barbara Holmes, Joy Un
speakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004).

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126 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

emy. The resistance to and lack of comprehension regarding black feminism

are based not on overly academic wording (which is its own turnoff) but on
a general perception of the inability of black feminism to identify with these
women's own day-to-day, average experiences of work and family and struggle.
This is not to say that black feminists have lived exclusively in the rarified air
of academe: women such as Angela Davis are seen as with the people, speak
ing their language, working with their issues. But Angela Davis is very much
part of another generation, as are Barbara Smith, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and
June Jordan, none of whom worked in religion or theology. None of these ear
lier black feminists needed, as do younger scholars, to deal with intellectual
terms that argue against standpoint or identity theory; that stress postmodern
ism to the point of making race a mere abstraction; that advocate postidentity,
post-Christianity, and the posthuman; and that view soccer-momdom as a vi
able expression of feminism. The earlier generations of black feminists had a
much more clearly defined world of racism and sexism in which to interact,
even as they had to battle intransigent or misogynist comrades within their own
and other liberation movements. These are major differences today: racism is
not boldly in-your-face; sexism is a Christianized favor offered to women; and
"good" feminists are rewarded with promotions. How much more difficult are
the analytical tasks ahead? What do we need to do to prepare?
These discussions need a bit more context. Black feminism has a much
longer history than womanist thought. Womanist religious thought, to some de
gree, developed from the shortcomings of black feminism, black male theology,
and general feminism. Knowing this disjuncture between black feminism and
black communities is of special note to those of us who work in fields of reli
gion, for we bridge into a pastoral world, often remaining grounded in various
religious communities. The challenge for black women religious scholars is to
speak to and with black women in the pews or on the prayer mats. The word
womanist bridges far more intellectual and social barriers for African American
women religion scholars than does black feminist.
These ideas bring me to the point where I most disagree with Coleman's
assessment of the black feminist/womanist discussion, drawing from my own
activist history. Coleman states, "Womanist religious scholarship has taken few
strong political stances." I know what is involved in making significant changes,
yet there is a state of mind current throughout American society that denies
the insidious resilience of racist and sexist thought. There is no golden land of
academic opportunity that readily welcomes women and our ideas with open
arms. There is still struggle, even as we find a few safe harbors. The day-to-day
academic politics for black women and men teaching at white institutions often
includes finding themselves the representative person of color on too many
committees; the poster child for PR campaigns; the representative to black com
munity groups; the adviser to students doing any kind of race studies; and the

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 127

informal mentor for black students. The black scholar's research suffers (this is
itself a form of silencing), and achieving tenure is at risk. This kind of situation
is not an exclusively black problem. Those people who use feminist frames as
the base of their analyses often find themselves bypassed, unsupported, and
ignored in favor of other scholars who are doing "important" research. These
political realities are spelled out in Mary Hunt's edited volume A Guide for
Women in Religion: Making Your Way from A to Z (2004).4
One reason that Coleman and others in her scholarly generation may not
"feel the pain" is that the elites that held power in the past have learned bet
ter and slicker ways to effectively silence dissent. Those methods of control
include, but are not limited to, semantics infiltration that takes over justice lan
guage and applies it to everybody (thereby making the original idea impotent);
defining away problems (while doing nothing about them); and using legislation
(for church or government, via sacred text or constitution) to keep people in
their places.
For African Americans, race-specific politics also shapes our views of life
and the world. In black religious communities, there are culturally specific ways
that political gaming is played. Some of these ways have severely negative im
pacts on black women members. For instance, some black churches are at the
forefront of efforts to reinscribe sexism and, indirectly, racism by naming an au
thentic "black" position. They may have "virtuous woman" programs (biblically
based, they claim) that show women how to get and keep men at the expense
of themselves. This is part of the real world in which womanists and black femi
nists and any other feminists lend the weight of their minds in black religious
studies. Therefore, to be a womanist involved in theological and ethical analyses
is to be involved in political processes.
Political situations also continue to arise in several ways within colleges
and churches as womanist scholars work to bring black women out of invis
ibility. In this, womanist scholars have made significant inroads, as evidenced
by Coleman's complaint that she felt pushed into a womanist category both in
her studies and on the job market. It has taken no small effort to bring woman
ist perspectives to some legitimacy within academic and religious circles. The
real problem is not that one scholar is pushed into a narrow frame but that the
diversity of all liberationist scholars is seldom recognized or celebrated. Just as
there are feminisms, so there are important comparative differences among
black religion scholars, be they womanist, black theologian, black ethicist, or
something else.
My answer for Monica Coleman's question, "Must I be womanist?" is cov
ered by three other questions, which were the base of my own reflections: Why

4 Mary Hunt, A Guide for Women in Religion: Making Your Way from Ato Z (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

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 128 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

am I in the academy? Wlhere is my joy?5 Which tools do I need to achieve, grow,

succeed, and survive? I have learned that whatever path one chooses, one must
be willing to grow with it, to change directions when necessary, and to keep ana
lyzing one's actions. The painful honesty that a commitment to feminist thought
demands requires a continual check-in. Coleman's question has helped me to
question myself and to arrive at the following answer: womanist is more than
a category or a name; it is a tool that can be used to intimately link praxis and
theory.

RESPONSE
Traci C. West

Womanist scholars of religion have helped to create a place at the table

for black women scholars and black women's studies within the Eurocentric
disciplinary traditions of a male-dominated religious academy. Any conversa
tion about the strengths and weaknesses of womanist religious studies must
acknowledge a debt of gratitude to womanist pioneers. There now exists a sub
stantive body of religious scholarship about black women's lives and religious
faith, in part because of how these groundbreaking efforts have helped to carve
out this intellectual legacy. It must also be remembered that the broader aca
demic context of any conversation about womanist religious studies is shaped
by historically rooted challenges of white supremacy. The mere fact that there
is a need for a discussion of whether religious studies of black women and by
black women scholars in religious fields can be located within varying schools of
thought is a consequence of constraining white supremacist assumptions. Can
you imagine a discussion about the appropriateness of assigning one analytical
category to identify the work of all white religious scholars? There is something
absurd and sad about the necessity to fight for the space in scholarly discourse
and the academic job and publishing markets for a black woman scholar to be
permitted to have more than one analytical label for her work. Yet it is indeed
reflective of current realities.
Monica Coleman's courageous article helps us to avoid the racist trap of
obedience to black communal taboos on critical discussions of blacks "in front
of whites." Critical discussions of womanist thought are healthy for the develop
ment of womanist religious studies. They signal freedom from bondage to the
need to assert a singular, uniform voice of "the black community" in order to
pierce the forms of racist disregard that blacks encounter in a white-dominated
academy. I find myself in agreement with much of Coleman's insightful critique

5 Thanks to M. Shawn Copeland for this question, which she asked of me when I was trying
to locate myself within the academy.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 129

of womanist religious studies, especially of its heteronormativity. Also, I reso

nate with Coleman's inquiries because I claim womanist religious scholarship as
an essential resource and conversation partner but tend to identify myself as a
black feminist.
As I have written elsewhere, my feminist consciousness was awakened as a
young adult by direct exposure to black feminist pioneers such as Michele Wal
lace, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Angela Davis, Beverly Smith, and Barbara
Smith.' The radical black lesbian feminism exhibited in the writings and activ
ism of several of these women is precisely what most excited me. It provided
language for many of my political, intellectual, and emotional yearnings. This
burgeoning black feminism of my young adulthood was also developed through
my exposure to white lesbian feminist and Latina lesbian feminist scholars. I
have not found a compelling reason to abandon this pivotal black feminist foun
dation, no matter how many people in the religious academy have decided that
all black women are now to be identified as womanists. (I suppose I should
also confess my personality flaw of a stubborn, knee-jerk reaction of resistance
whenever there is pressure to do something simply because "everybody" says it
is the thing to do.)
The distinction between black feminism and womanism has been blurred
in several ways that militate against becoming too preoccupied with trying to
capture it. As Coleman notes, the very first point in Alice Walker's definition of
womanism describes a womanist as a black feminist.2 If Walker's 1983 definition
is still the primary arbiter of the meaning of the term womanist for religious
scholars, the effort to create a sharply differentiated dichotomy between the
definition of black feminism and womanism is somewhat bogus. In fact, wom
anist Christian ethics and theology have often incorporated black feminist ter
minology and scholarship. Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black
Community (1995) includes Katie Cannon's essay "The Emergence of Black
Feminist Consciousness" as one of the building blocks of Cannon's womanist
method in Christian ethics that she lays out in that volume.3 One of the hall
mark essays of womanist Christian ethicist Emilie Townes, "Living in the New
Jerusalem: The Rhetoric and Movement of Liberation in the House of Evil"
(1993), is centrally informed by the ideas of black feminist Audre Lorde.4 This

1 See my essays "Visions of Womanhood: Beyond Idolizing Heteropatriarchy," Union Semi

nary Quarterly Review 58, nos. 3-4 (2004): 128-39, and "Is a Womanist a Black Feminist? Mark
ing the Distinctions and Defying Them," in Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and
Society, ed. Stacey Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
2 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1983), xi-xii.
3 Katie G. Cannon, Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New
York: Continuum, 1995).
4 Emilie M. Townes, A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 78-91.

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 130 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

merger of black feminist and womanist thought in womanist religious studies

has also been exemplified by scholarly practices such as the hosting of black
feminist bell hooks by the womanist section of the American Academy of Re
ligion, with responses from womanist panelists who all celebrated her work in
their presentations.
In a 1993 article that strongly criticizes discourse in theological education
related to these categories, Delores Williams asserts that "too few black femi
nists and womanists touch the lives of the rank-and-file black women in the black
community."5 Her candor about the deficiencies she finds in feminist intellectual
methods is thought provoking and deserves a comprehensive response that I do
not offer here. I reference this article to point out an early attempt at articulat
ing a womanist scholarly self-definition in relation to feminism. Williams offers
the rather harsh assertion that black feminists "have produced little more than
imitations of white feminist intellectual agendas" and encourages both wom
anists and feminists to jointly interrogate whether feminist theory contributes
to the advancement of white supremacy.6 Williams challenges: "Are feminists
and womanists prepared to experience the grave uncertainty and isolation that
comes with giving up the master's tools, especially his words, his categories and
his mode of control called imperialism?"7 Ironically, she utilizes the analytical
"tools" of black feminist Audre Lorde to issue this challenge and of black femi
nist Barbara Christian to frame her criticism of feminist theorizing.
In the web of blurred feminist-womanist categories that exists in womanist
religious scholarship, it seems that many womanists want to create a woman
ist voice that is distinctive from feminism most strongly in contrast to white
feminism and much more weakly in relation to black feminism. But I am not
convinced of the usefulness of sorting out these overlapping analytical relation
ships into discrete, differentiated categories. Perhaps the political implications
of making such distinctions need to be examined. For instance, do the narrow
parameters of this womanist versus black feminist versus white feminist con
versation reinforce a black-white monopoly of social interests that undermines
regard for related Asian American, Latina, or Native American scholarly voices
and social interests? I would strongly argue on behalf of the necessity for those
of us who contribute to black women's studies in religion to learn from these
related perspectives in order to expand and complicate our work.
If binary-oppositional categories are maintained as a kind of race-based in
tellectual straitjacket for black women scholars, problematic implications arise
not only for the next wave of black women scholars Coleman refers to but also
for potential academic mentors of those scholars. If one consents to the paro

5 Delores S. Williams, "Womanist/Feminist Dialogue: Problems and Possibilities," Journal

of Feminist Studies in Religion 9 (Spring-Fall 1993): 68.
6 Ibid., 69.
7 Ibid., 72.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 131

chial logic that all black women scholars of religion must be classified as "wom
anists," it may also seem fitting to presume that only womanists can mentor
black women students. Does that mean that faculty who are not black women
need not read black women's studies in religion and/or mentor black women
entering fields of religious studies? The intellectual talents of black women
scholars are harmfully restricted by such scholarly boundaries. Furthermore, if
these boundaries are accepted, white scholars (who make up the majority of the
religion academy in the United States) and other scholars of color (for example,
Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders) would be
excused both from engaging with the ideas in black women's studies in religion
and from cultivating emerging black women scholars. Scholars of religion do
not, of course, require permission from womanists to focus on theoretical ideas
and studies authored by whites and Europeans, to teach their students to do the
same, or to excuse themselves from an obligation to mentor scholars in their
field who are not white.
The conversation about the distinction between womanism and feminism
also has political implications beyond the academy. Daphne Wiggins demon
strates one approach to this question in her empirical study Righteous Content:
Black Women's Perspectives of Church and Faith (2005), an ethnographic study
focusing on the religiosity of the black female membership of one Pentecostal
and two Baptist black church congregations in Georgia.8 Wiggins examines these
women's self-described beliefs and behaviors. She notes a few of the women's
brief or distasteful references to "feminism" and includes a careful discussion of
whether the term womanism applies to the devout group of Christian women
that she studied. Wiggins summarizes ideas from Christian womanist scholars
and weighs their relevance to these churchwomen, at some points finding help
ful connections and at other points rejecting the term's applicability:
If one has to embrace all aspects of the definition to be womanist, then
one particular part of the definition is problematic. The inclusion of pos
itive regard for women who may love women sexually or nonsexually as
a defining trait of a womanist also disqualifies these women as woman
ists. Admittedly, whether to label these women as "womanists" may be a
misplaced preoccupation on my part.9

Wiggins's cautiousness about imposing a womanist label on the women she stud
ied shows respect for their right to self-definition, but I wished for more details
on this issue of sexuality. Wiggins does not elaborate on what she means by her
assertion of a lack of "positive regard for women who may love women sexually
or nonsexually" among her interviewees. Does this mean that her subjects do

8 Daphne C. Wiggins, Righteous Content: Black Women's Perspectives of Church and Faith
(New York: New York University Press, 2005).
9 Ibid., 176.

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 132 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

not have a positive regard for themselves if they are lesbians or for their daugh
ters, nieces, and cousins who may be lesbians? Is a heterosexual identity as
sumed here for all church members and their families? What concerns or fears
prevent investigation of nonsexual love between women? As Wiggins creatively
explores the definition of womanism within the scope of this research project,
the constraints of heteronormativity and homophobia seem to show up.
Coleman's article reasons that it is because they tend to be empirical (of
a "descriptive nature") that womanist studies of black women, unlike feminist
ones, lack a "political edge." I do not agree with Coleman if she means by this
that political issues are not present in empirical studies. It is not the nature of
a study but the choices the author makes about which questions to explore that
create "edginess" with regard to political issues that are present in the material.
For instance, issues related to how expressions of lesbian sexuality are mani
fested in the power dynamics of black church life are present within contexts
that womanist empirical studies cover, though such issues may be insufficiently
examined. Political concerns (or power dynamics) merit "edgy" reflection be
cause of their moral importance-their revelations about hierarchies of worth
and status, even among women. In black women's studies in religion, the mat
ters of moral import that most compellingly beg for attention reside not in dis
cernment of who fits under which label-"feminist," "womanist," "black femi
nist," or "third-wave womanist-feminist"-but in questions about the subject
matter, such as why and how scholarship about black communities and religious
life attends to issues of sexuality and sexual orientation.
This topic of sexuality and sexual orientation should be compelling because
of instances of gay teenagers who, as a result of their parents' religious beliefs,
are put out of their homes to fend for themselves on the streets. The stories of
the black and Latino homeless youth served by the Green Chimneys programs
for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender children, youth, and families in New York
City illustrate this problem.'0 For me, black women's studies in religion should
interrogate heteronormativity, heterosexism, and homophobia because of vio
lent assaults that occur on the streets of poor black neighborhoods, such as the
2003 murder of black lesbian teenager Sakia Gunn in Newark, New Jersey.
Such an interrogation is also needed because of the morally repugnant church
rejection-based upon sex/gender prejudices and bigotry-of smart and skilled
women for clerical leadership that I continue to learn about from black lesbian
seminarians who describe their treatment when I teach and speak on seminary
campuses.
I know that these reasons for including a focus on heterosexism, hetero
normativity, and homophobia in black women's studies in religion are not as
convincing to many heterosexual religious scholars who contribute to black
women's studies as they are for me. But perhaps the influence of political oppo

10 See http://www.greenchimneys.org/.

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 Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist? 133

sition to "gay marriage" by black Christian clergy will persuade more of them to
see the urgency of addressing the politics of sex/gender issues in black churches
and communities. Clergy in Atlanta, Boston, Washington, DC, and many other
places have spoken out against marriage equality, especially prior to the 2004
elections. Arguing that they represent the moral values of blacks, clergy such as
black evangelist T. D. Jakes and pastor Herbert Lusk urged blacks to support
anti-gay-rights white politicians whose political strategies included targeting
black communities to deny them their right to vote in Florida in 2000 (and again
in Ohio in 2004), and whose political goals included the reduction of federal
programs that support education, health care, clean air, housing, employment
opportunities (except military service), and affirmative action-programs that
provide services upon which members of black communities disproportionately
rely." If blacks can be persuaded by their church leaders to vote in record num
bers against every economic and social self-interest that they have because bar
ring gays and lesbians from marriage is the only social value of importance for
their lives and communities, how can Christian womanists, black feminists, or
anyone else who could offer thoughtful leadership continue to ignore the need
for black churches and communities to confront their homophobia?
Unexamined and unchallenged, heterosexism and homophobia also contrib
ute to black community leaders and clergy parroting the rhetoric of right-wing
political think tanks. They assert, as the editorial page of the black Washing
ton, DC, newspaper the Afro-American declared at the end of 2005, a socio
economic claim that heterosexual marriage is not only what African Americans
need but also "a blessing to the entire country."'12 This new rhetoric and the $1.5
billion marriage initiative that is part of President George W Bush's contribu
tion to welfare reform are yet another assault on poor, single black mothers (of
all sexual orientations). Such developments also create a new frontier of com
munal complicity in the battering, marital rape, emotional and spiritual anguish,
and isolation that black women victim-survivors of intimate violence within het
erosexual marriages and partnerships already experience. Is it a naive hope on
my part that the demeaning and maybe even life-endangering consequences for
so many black women of this worship of the superiority of heterosexuality will
compel any contributor to black women's studies in religion to include black
heterosexism as a fundamental concern that must be interrogated?
The serious dangers posed by simplistic moral rhetoric about blacks repre
sent a familiar and perpetual struggle under the conditions of white supremacy.

11 See Hanna Rosin, "Redeem the Vote Spreads the Election-Year Gospel," Washington
Post, October 29, 2004; David D. Kirkpatrick, "Black Pastors Backing Bush Are Rarities, But Not
Alone," New York Times, October 5,2004; Laurie Goodstein, "Minister, a Bush Ally, Gives Church
as Site for Alito Rally," New York Times, January 5, 2006; and Thomas Edsall, "Christian Right
Mobilizes for Judge; Conservative Tilt Sought on Bench," Washington Post, January 9,2006.
12 Editorial, Washington Afro-American, December 3-9, 2005.

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 134 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

How does one resist the imposition of all types of narrow and constraining cat
egories for blacks? How does one even resist the conversations about sorting
out categories and labels? Racist manipulations and patronizing reductions of
black life are implicated in the impulse to do this kind of sorting. I want to
resist a conversation about the term womanist if the purpose is merely to have
an all-about-me-and-my-self-interests-as-a-black-woman session that endlessly
celebrates black womanlyood by choosing certain aspects of black women's his
tory, practices, and struggles that can be construed as virtuous and neglecting
others that cannot be. I also want to resist this conversation if it will be used as
a means for pitting me against my black sisters in the religious academy with
whom I have any intellectual differences. I do want to have this conversation in
order to develop womanist and black feminist religious studies that dare to offer
liberative thought in the repressive climate of our society.

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