What I Have Taught My Feminism, Part I

Now that you have done your assigned reading, it is time for the next chapter of Beth's feminist musings, "What I Have Taught My Feminism."

[Read the first series here.]

Now that I have begun, I might as well continue to develop a few more thoughts on vulnerability and gender. Again, I want to put these musings into a wider context; this time, “What I Have Taught My Feminism.” My feminism has taught me valuable lessons, but on occasion, I have had to instruct it, especially when I try to make it play nicely with my Church. There are two lessons in particular that I want to focus on, because of how crucial they are for correcting misunderstandings between my feminism and my Church.

First: Vulnerability is not a bad thing. The opposite assumption comes not just from my feminism, but from our society as a whole. And I am, as a stubbornly independent woman, perhaps particularly susceptible to it. As a basic, working definition I give, “the potentiality to be hurt.” It need not imply an actual being hurt: a newborn child, with the wisest, most doting parents, is extremely vulnerable. We don’t like vulnerability: it implies helplessness, weakness, and passivity. What about that sounds good?

The helplessness, I suppose, is part of the definition of vulnerability, but I mean to contend that the other two are not, or need not be. Vulnerability can be accompanied by an active strength, because it is can be primarily a factor of opennesss.

Or, to use the words of everyone’s favorite Polish Pope, it is about gift of self. The meaning of our humanity – of being a person – is the ability to make a gift of ourselves and to accept the gift of another. This is a huge starting point for his theology of the body. We are our bodies. In the beginning, this gift was safe because no one would think of harming another. Now, however, the gift involves risk – risk of exploitation or rejection. Thus gift of self = vulnerability. The catch is: gift of self = only true way to be a person. Vulnerability is intrinsic to our personhood and inescapable for our humanity.