Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion: Embodying Knowledge

By Kwok Pui-lan

This book presents personal narratives and collective ethnography of the emergence and development of Asian and Asian American women’s scholarship in theology and religious studies. It demonstrates how the authors’ religious scholarship is based on an embodied epistemology influenced by their social locations. Contributors reflect on their understanding of their identity and how this changed over time, the contribution of Asian and Asian American women to the scholarship work that they do, and their hopes for the future of their fields of study. The volume is multireligious and intergenerational, and is divided into four parts: identities and intellectual journeys, expanding knowledge, integrating knowledge and practice, and dialogue across generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030368180

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2020

K. Pui-lan (ed.)Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and ReligionAsian Christianity in the Diasporahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36818-0_1

1. Introduction

Kwok Pui-lan ¹  

(1)

Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Kwok Pui-lan 

Email: [e-mail]

In the past several decades, Asian and Asian American women have contributed to many theological and religious disciplines, including biblical studies, theology, history, ethics, practical theology, religious education, Asian and Asian American religious studies, interreligious studies, and so on. From the beginning of a small group of pioneers, their number has grown to include several generations of scholars and students using interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational approaches increasingly in their research methods and studies. By placing Asian and Asian American women as the focus of study, they have pointed to the complexity of women’s religious lives and the impact of religion in shaping identity, community engagement, and culture in their communities. Together they have created a community of discourse and crafted new subfields and entire areas of studies that others can build on.

An important network that supports this work by providing an interlocutory space for the exchange of ideas is Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM). In the fall of 1984, a group of Asian and Asian American female seminarians and ministers met to form a network, and their first conference was held in 1985. Since then, the network has organized annual meetings in various cities in the U.S. and Canada, attended by faculty and students, local ministers, and community leaders and activists.¹ Its members have played active roles in religious communities, academia, and social movements in North America and Asia. Several have become leaders of their professional associations, guilds, and institutions, while others have spearheaded the creation of new subfields or approaches in their areas of studies. The network produced two anthologies Off the Menu and Leading Wisdom to celebrate its 20th and 30th anniversary, respectively.²

This volume focuses on how members and friends of the network have created theologies, religious understanding, and new knowledge and the ways they have contributed to transnational feminist theological and religious conversations. The production of new learning is done not in a vacuum but in the matrix of relationships and community built over a long time. It takes a lot of care, commitment, and persistence to create and nurture an intellectual neighborhood. In this neighborhood, people gradually learn the language, concepts and discourses, and the perspectives to look at their communities and world as Asian and Asian American women. They have created a community to listen to each other’s stories, affirm the validity of their common experiences, and discern how their own narrative is different when juxtaposed with that of others. In claiming to speak their own truths, they serve as role models or catalysts for others to do the same, however timid and provisional the voices might be in the beginning. By making visible what has been hitherto invisible, sometimes even initially to themselves, they explore religious worlds that are only partially known, while borrowing each other’s insights to develop theoretical frameworks that fit the subject under study.

This book is unusual because it describes the development of a new field and the social, cultural, religious, and political factors that both called it forth and to which the contributors responded. It is precious because of the generosity of spirit behind the sharing of moving personal narratives and collective ethnography³ that document why the contributors do the kind of work that they do. What were the twists and turns in their lives that prompted them to take a new departure from the kind of scholarship they were trained in or had been pursuing? Why could existing disciplinary boundaries or established research methods not quite explain their experiences or the lifeworlds they have come from? What were the inhibitions, censorship, or institutional barriers they have encountered in the process to gain a place at the table? Were there self-doubt, double checking, and moments of uncertainty? Is there a time to speak and a time to hold back? Is it easier to speak now than it was a generation ago? Who is their audience—imagined and real—and what kinds of impact do they want to make? What are the new possibilities of inhabiting the life as an intellectual with many demands and communities of accountabilities?

The subtitle of the book, embodying knowledge, signals that Asian and Asian American women’s religious scholarship is based on an embodied epistemology and influenced by the authors’ identity formation and social location. Contributors come from different Asian ethnicities and backgrounds, and two of them have biracial heritages. While a few are Asians studying or working in the U.S., many of them are Asian American women whose families have been in the U.S. for different periods of time (from new immigrants to third-generation Americans). The book includes the contributors’ reflections on how their identities have shaped the work that they do as scholars, activists, and/or public intellectuals. They also explore how their relations to other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. affect their identity formation.

The contributors have weaved a rich and multicolored tapestry to showcase the various shapes, shades, and patterns of embodied knowing and knowledge. For them, the body is a site of knowledge. Many Asian and Asian American women have been socialized by their religious and cultural environment to regard the female body as taboo, dirty, or chaotic. Living in a world defined by white supremacy, they have been made to think that their body is less than, and that it does not quite measure up to society’s white heteropatriarchal ideals. As a site of knowledge, the body reveals and remembers the disciplinary mechanisms, the hurts and the guilts, as well the desires and passions. By reconnecting with this bodily knowledge, contributors gain new perspectives, disrupt existing patterns, and make creative turns in looking at the body, gender, and religion.

The body exists in a certain space, and the places that some of the contributors have inhabited shape their outlook and prompt them to ask critical questions—such as having grown up in a large Catholic family in a slum, being caught between black and white students during the heydays of the civil rights movement, teaching as an Asian feminist in a predominantly black college, studying theology in South Korea as a queer Christian woman, or having served as youth minsters in violence-plagued tribal communities in Myanmar. While this sense of place sharpens their standpoints and calls for responsibilities and accountabilities, their sense of belonging is not limited to their original place or any one place, whether defined by locale, region, or nation. They do not see their social location as fixed or over-determined, because they understand that, as gendered and racialized women, they simultaneously belong to multiple places and sometimes no places. The fluidity of conceptualizing space and place leads some of the authors to speak about the search for home as a continuous, life-long journey, while others talk about the body as being in transit or shuttling from here and there. Some authors articulate how the scope and approaches of their research have changed over time as their identities shifted from Asian to Asian in diaspora and/or Asian American.

The individual body is situated in the larger body politics shaped by gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, religion, colonialism, and so forth. This body politics has changed in the last several decades because of globalization and the shifting transnational relationships between the U.S. and Asian countries. Within the U.S., the Asian population has grown from 10.2 million in 2000 to 22.2 million in 2017, making Asians the fastest-growing racial ethnic community in the U.S.⁴ While there are encouraging signs that the number of Asian women business and political leaders in Asia and the U.S. has increased, reports of growing gender violence in South Asia and other Asian societies have been devastating. Asian women have been violated, raped, beaten, and killed amid ethnic and religious strife and wars, as well as during the treacherous journeys as refugees and migrants in search for survival.

The body and bodily practices provide the book’s contributors with metaphors, images, and language to discuss Asian and Asian American women’s identity and religious lives. For example, one of the frequently cited concepts in this book is interstitial integrity offered by Rita Nakashima Brock. Brock uses this concept to describe the process of integration of many diverse parts of herself as a mixed-race person who grew up across three continents. The term interstitial is rooted in biology of the body, coming from interstitium, which refers to tissues that connect organs to one another. She writes, Interstitial integrity is how I improvise a self, recognizing the diverse cultures and experiences that have made me who I am. It is how I mix a life together from myriads of ingredients.⁵ While Brock explores the connections between body, self, and identity, Sharon A. Suh, a Buddhist scholar and meditation and yoga teacher, uses language about the body to discuss religion, gender, and race in this volume. She describes the need for women of color to develop somatic consciousness and take refuge in the body because the body remembers and keeps scores. She helps women to connect emotions to physical sensations of the body so that they can seek resilience of both body and mind. Through bodily practices such as mindful eating, meditation, and yoga, women who have been traumatized by the white supremacist society can claim agency and freedom to make moral choices.

Embodied knowledge is different from the kind of rational knowledge emphasized in the Western philosophical tradition, which tends to dissociate the body from the mind, separating emotion from intellect.⁶ In embodied knowing, the knower does not perceive the outside world as the relationship between subject and object. Rather, there is mutuality and intersubjectivity. The aim of embodied knowing is not to grasp, control, classify, and manipulate, but rather to seek deeper understanding, appreciation, and creative transformation. Instead of conceiving the knower as a hero or a genius, embodied knowing stresses the need for learning in context and in community. As the body depends on others for survival, embodied knowledge relies on hearing others into speech, developing somatic consciousness of one’s environment, and conjuring images and words to describe new insights and perceptions. Jung Ha Kim and Su Yon Pak write, Asian and Asian North American women point to remembering, witnessing, and cultivating wisdom in between and among various human relationships…As a result, wisdom is connective, integrative, and restorative.⁷

Asian and Asian American women’s search for embodied knowledge and wisdom is subversive in a white heteronormative academy that does not acknowledge that their bodies and experiences count. While there are many books on white women’s religious history, there is at present no single volume on Asian American women’s religious history. Asian and Asian American queer women find that they are even more invisible in the church, faith communities, and academy. In order to expand the scope of available sources, the authors have investigated archival material, autobiographical and personal narratives, popular culture, films, social media, rituals, and bodily practices. They have used interview, participatory observation, and ethnography to generate new data and information. While honoring the religious practices of their ancestors, they at the same time critique androcentric and heteropatriarchal communal customs and traditions. In their interpretation of texts, they develop ideological criticism and postcolonial and resistance feminist readings to challenge the power dynamics inscribed in the texts as well in the history of interpretation.

Embodied knowledge and wisdom are pluralistic, open-ended, and invitational. There is no epistemological uneasiness to search for Plato’s Forms, an ultimate foundation of truth, or an Archimedean principle. Jin Young Choi points out that, in the Bible, there is a pluralistic understanding of wisdom with different names. While many feminist theologians have focused on sophia, translated as wisdom in Wisdom Literature, there is another term phronēsis, which has been variously translated as wisdom (Baruch 3), understanding (Proverbs 3:19), and insight (Proverbs 7:4).⁸ Sophia is more associated with objective and theoretical knowledge in the Greek tradition, while phronēsis is more like practical knowledge connected to action. Choi writes, phronēsis is knowledge in action or knowing what to do in a particular situation.⁹ Asian and Asian American women’s embodied knowing focuses not on detached, abstract, and logocentric knowledge, but on practical wisdom and somatic insights for living in the interstices and for the wholeness of the community.

To provide coherence to the book, contributors have been asked to reflect on their understanding of their identity as Asian and Asian American women and how this changed over time, the contribution of Asian and Asian American women to the scholarly work that they do, and their hopes for the future of their fields of study or scholarly work. Whether they were born in the US or came as immigrants or students, assuming the identity of Asian and Asian American was, and continues to be, an evolving process. For some, it was particular historical and personal circumstances that heightened their awareness of their identity. For others, it was through meeting other women who shared their experience and/or reading books and acquiring new knowledge. Their understanding of their racial, gender, sexual, and class identities is not static and has changed over time. At times, the different components of their identities can even conflict with one another. For example, one’s heteropatriarchal upbringing in Christian churches may conflict with one’s sexual identity. The pressure to speak and express oneself in the American classroom may challenge Asian gender norms of obedience, compliancy, and not showing off. The images about Asia portrayed in American mass media are often incongruent with Asia, which they have grown up in or come to know. The U.S. has been involved in colonization or wars in Asian countries, such as the Philippines, China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. The collisions of the multiple worlds that one inhabits and the different senses of belonging can be frustrating, but the dissonance and contradictions can also provide food for thought and spaces for creative imagining.

In my chapter in Off the Menu, I commented on the differences between Asian and Asian American women and their theological outlooks. In doing feminist theology, Asian women want to emphasize their Asian-ness by reconnecting with their historical and cultural memory that has been suppressed or downplayed because of colonialism. In the U.S., because of racism, Asian American women want to claim that they have every right to be American. When Asian American studies was established as a field, there were conscious attempts to distinguish it from the studies of Asian language, history, and civilization. In the chapter, I argued for a transnational model that treats the histories of the U.S. and Asian societies as overlapping and mutually inscribed and for a transnational feminist theology that is not limited by national borders, geography, and essentialized cultural traits. I wrote, Speaking within Asia and in between Asia and North America, feminist theologians of Asian descent occupy different positions, sometimes mutually reinforcing and other times contesting, in the vast flow of ideas, peoples, cultures, and histories of the transnational Asia Pacific.¹⁰ More than a decade later, I would argue that such a transnational lens is more pertinent than ever. After the military conflicts in the Middle East, there has been a pivot to Asia in American political and military strategies since President Obama. The emergence of China as the world’s second largest economy, the trade wars between China and the U.S., the technological Cold War, and the heightened bilateral relationships between the U.S. and Asian countries, all point to shifting geopolitical realities in Asia Pacific. Globalization, the information highway, and social media have brought a compression of time and space. For over thirty years, PANAAWTM has refused to see Asian and Asian American realities as sharply divided and provided opportunities for transnational linkages and conversations, and some of the members continued that dialogue when they returned to or visited Asian countries.

As the personal narratives of many contributors have shown, bringing Asian and Asian American identities to bear on their scholarship or discipline is not an easy task. There are clear differences between generations and across various fields. The pioneers who introduced Asian and Asian American perspectives to their fields must challenge disciplinary norms and institutional ethos. Gale A. Yee, trained in biblical criticism that emphasizes objectivity and historicism, came to see the Bible through Asian American eyes. Jane Naomi Iwamura became interested in Japanese American family altars and religious experience of her ancestors because this body of knowledge was missing in her studies. As a church historian, Haruko Nawata Ward found evidence that Reformation(s) in Europe also brought changes in the religious lives of non-European women and men.¹¹ Working in interreligious studies, Najeeba Syeed found that the fields of interreligious dialog and comparative theology are dominated by white scholars and supported by predominantly Christian institutions. As a Muslim scholar, activist, and community educator, she has to challenge many institutional assumptions and boundaries in her teaching and scholarship.

Even though the second generation of scholars may have role models or existing works to consult, that does not mean that their work is less demanding. First, they may work in fields in which very little work has been done by Asian and Asian American women. Grace Y. Kao and her colleagues had to form the Asian American Working Group of the Society of Christian Ethics to begin the conversation.¹² June Hee Yoon has to find sources of inspiration from white and black scholars in addition to Asian and Asian American women because little has been published on queer Asian Christian women. Since most published works in Asian and Asian American feminist biblical studies and theology are by women of East Asian background, those from South Asian and Southeast Asian contexts must find their sources and develop their own critical methods. There is also the dominance of Christian literature, and scholars working in Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and other traditions or in interreligious education find their work even more invisible.

Networks such as PANAAWTM, Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI); the Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society unit of the American Academy of Religion; the Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics unit of the Society of Biblical Literature; Asian Theological Summer Institute, and others are supportive organizations to nurture Asian and Asian American women’s religious scholarship. Within PANAAWTM, through role modeling and mentoring, emerging scholars and students are encouraged to create new knowledge, present their embodied knowing in various forms, and share leadership. One of the gifts offered by PANAAWTM is the gathering of many Asian and Asian American women from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds who are academics, ministers, activists, and community leaders. Students have rarely seen such diversity within their own institutions. Being exposed to diverse styles of speaking, organizing, leading, and ritualizing broadens their imagination of who they can be and what career options they may pursue.

In the future, we hope that there will be more scholarship connecting Asian and Asian American women’s struggles and histories to those of other racial and ethnic minorities and tribal and indigenous communities. Nami Kim describes in her chapter the important work she has begun to do in Afro/black-Asian connections. We hope more work can be done oriented toward the fertilization of ideas and coalition building across racial, ethnic, and national divides. As both Asian and Asian American communities are religiously pluralistic, there is the need for developing multireligious perspectives and interreligious education drawing not predominantly from white scholarship but from the experiences of our communities. Sexuality remains a taboo subject in Asian and Asian American cultures. Two contributors describe the struggles they have faced as queer Christian women in Asian America. More work needs to be done using sexuality as a critical lens to look at the intersection of religion, race, nation, and empire. In the future, we hope to hear more from people of mixed heritages, adoptees, women from the Pacific, and women from other Asian ethnic groups.

As the other books sponsored by PANAAWTM, this book is a communal process. I consulted with members of different ethnic and disciplinary backgrounds during the conception of the book project. I also asked their advice about possible contributors. I regret that I cannot include some women who have made critical contributions to the field because of the need to balance different generations, fields, and ethnic backgrounds. I have also purposefully included the voices of students to showcase emergent scholarship and the concerns of the next generation. Several contributors had the opportunity to share their journey and highlight their scholarship during the PANAAWTM meeting in Atlanta in 2019. After the chapters have been received, I grouped them into four parts based on the contents and connections with other chapters. The division of the parts is not hard and fast, as some chapters could easily fit in more than one part. Part I, Identities and Intellectual Journeys, offers personal narratives of how the contributors grappled with their Asian and Asian American identities and integrated them into their scholarship. The stories of a third-generation Chinese American from South Side Chicago, a mixed-race Japanese American theologian adopted by a white father, a second-generation Korean American Buddhist who insists on integrating race and gender in her scholarship, and an international queer student from Korea offer glimpses of the diversity of identities and intellectual trajectories.

The second part, Expanding Knowledge, discusses the ways that Asian and Asian American women have examined their own fields, identified the lacunas, and made connections to the emerging body of scholarship by other Asian and Asian American women. The contributors include seasoned and emerging scholars in the study of Asian American religions, religious history, the Bible, and theology. For some, expanding knowledge means generating new resources from their cultures or communities and working with seldom examined archives or texts. For others, it is interpreting ancient or early modern texts differently from the mainstream and bringing them to bear on current struggles of Asian and Asian American women. They discuss their role models and sources of support as they chart new fields or venture into new territories.

Part III, Integrating Knowledge and Practice, discusses why the development of this body of embodied knowledge matters to our communities and wider society. The authors discuss the relationship between knowledge production and cross-racial solidarity, interreligious education, leadership formation, and development of new moral imagination of students. The essays illustrate how the authors develop and put into practice phrosēsis as administrators, educators, and community activists and leaders. While the practical fields have been considered secondary to the theoretical disciplines because they are seen merely as applications, the authors contest this understanding by showing that theory and practice are closely interrelated. Knowledge can be derived from practice, activism, and teach-ins, and theory can be tested and modified in concrete situations.

While readers will find conversations across generations in many chapters, to highlight intergenerational learning and collaboration, the last part, Dialogue Across Generations, invites professors and students to work on their chapters together. Authors describe the ways in which insights and knowledge have been passed from one generation to another. They express gratitude to their mentors who have influenced their development and share their hopes for the future. The genre of the last chapter is different from others for it consists of imaginative letters written to the authors’ intellectual or spiritual sisters-mothers-aunties who have influenced them. The more personal form of writing shows another way of embodied thinking and risk-taking.

A volume like this has urgency since some of the Asian and Asian American women who have contributed to the fields have retired or are near retirement age. It is important to preserve their legacy and pass on their embodied knowledge and wisdom. Working on this volume reminded me of many conversations I was privileged to have in PANAAWTM and other networks. My life and scholarship have benefited much from relationships formed over decades and the various opportunities I had to share my thoughts. I hope this book is helpful not only to the Asian and Asian American community, but also to members of other racial and ethnic groups and those who are looking for clues to develop fresh perspectives and new scholarship. As geopolitical relationships in Asia Pacific will shape the future of the twenty-first century, it is critical to make Asian and Asian American women’s religious scholarship more visible and accessible.

Bibliography

Brock, Rita Nakashima, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-lan, and Seung Ai Yang, eds. Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.

Census Says There Are 22.2 Million Asian Americans and Rising. AsAmNews, May 14, 2019. https://​asamnews.​com/​2019/​05/​14/​census-says-there-are-22-2-million-asian-americans-and-rising/​.

Cox, Wendell. Asians: America’s Fastest Growing Minority. New Geography, January 12, 2015. http://​www.​newgeography.​com/​content/​004825-asians-americas-fastest-growing-minority.

Kao, Grace Y., and Ilsup Ahn. Introduction: What is Asian American Christian Ethics? In Asian American Christian Ethics: Voices, Methods, Issues, edited by Grace Y. Kao and Ilsup Ahn, 1–17. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015.

Kwok, Pui-lan, and Rachel A. R. Bundang. PANAAWTM Lives! Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 2 (2005): 147–58.Crossref

Nussbaum, Martha. Upheaval of Thoughts: The Intelligence of Emotions. New ed. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Pak, Su Yon, and Jung Ha Kim, eds. Leading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017.

Ward, Haruko Nawata. Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009.

Footnotes

1

See the network’s website, www.​panaawtm.​org, and Kwok Pui-lan and Rachel A. R. Bundang, PANAAWTM Lives! Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 2 (2005): 147–58.

2

Rita Nakashima Brock et al., eds., Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007); Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim, eds., Leading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017).

3

I am indebted to Mai-Anh Le Tran who mentioned this term when I discussed with her about how to conceptualize this book.

4

Wendell Cox, Asians: America’s Fastest Growing Minority, New Geography, January 12, 2015, http://​www.​newgeography.​com/​content/​004825-asians-americas-fastest-growing-minority; Census Says There Are 22.2 Million Asian Americans and Rising, AsAmNews, May 14, 2019, https://​asamnews.​com/​2019/​05/​14/​census-says-there-are-22-2-million-asian-americans-and-rising/​.

5

Rita Nakashima Brock, Cooking Without Recipes: Interstitial Integrity, in Off the Menu, ed. Brock et al., 126.

6

Scholars such as Martha Nussbaum have investigated the relation between emotion and intelligence in the Western tradition. See Nussbaum, Upheaval of Thoughts: The Intelligence of Emotions, New ed. (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

7

Jung Ha Kim and Su Yon Pak, Introduction, in Leading Wisdom, ed. Pak and Kim, 7–8.

8

Jin Young Choi, "Phronēsis, the Other Wisdom Sister," in Leading Wisdom, ed. Pak and Kim, 108.

9

Choi, "Phronēsis," 109.

10

Kwok Pui-lan, Fishing the Asia Pacific: Transnationalism and Feminist Theology, in Off the Menu, ed. Brock et al., 17.

11

Haruko Nawata Ward, Women Religious Leaders in Japan’s Christian Century, 1549–1650 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

12

See the discussion in Grace Y. Kao and Ilsup Ahn, Introduction: What is Asian American Christian Ethics? in Asian American Christian Ethics: Voices, Methods, Issues, ed. Grace Y. Kao and Ilsup Ahn (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), 1–17.

Part IIdentities and Intellectual Journeys

© The Author(s) 2020

K. Pui-lan (ed.)Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and ReligionAsian Christianity in the Diasporahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36818-0_2

2. The Process of Becoming for a Woman Warrior from the Slums

Gale A. Yee¹  

(1)

Episcopal Divinity School, New York, NY, USA

Gale A. Yee

One of the first pieces of Asian American literature I encountered was Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior in the 1970s.¹ However, I did not actually read the book until the late 1980s when I was team-teaching a course on Women in