Glossary Flashcards
Both/And
Rather than an either/or approach to theology, a both/and approach, described by Vivian May, encourages an embrace of nuance, interconnections, complicated relationships, fluidity, and even contradiction.
Bracket
To set aside one’s own beliefs and assumptions in order to enter into the logics of other claims.
Colonialism
When a group or nation seeks control of another people or nation. In most cases to exploit the land, resources, people, and her- itage.
Difference
Socially constructed binaries that confer dominance or sub- ordination on group members (gender, race, social class, ability, sexual identity, age, religion, country of origin). In other words, difference is those identities that get assigned to us in such a way that they affect how others interact with us and how we interact with the world. Based on which identity is assigned to us, we are put in a place in the social hier- archy. That place is complicated by the way differences intersect.
Feminism
bell hooks defines feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression.
Gender:
The ways people perform socially constructed masculine or feminine behaviors/identities.
Gender-First:
An analytical approach that gives priority to gender over other intersecting facets of identity, such as race or sexuality.
Gender Identity:
An individual’s own sense of gender, which may or may not match the gender assigned at birth.
Han:
A Korean term that is often translated as “unjust suffering.” Every- one suffers, but oppressive systems such as sexism and racism create “unjust suffering.” The pain experienced in han is often described as “piercing of the heart” and “deep woundedness in the heart.” Korean American theologians use the term “han” to describe the Asian American experience of racism, oppression, and marginalization.
Hermeneutics of Indeterminacy:
An interpretive approach that fosters multiple and sometimes conflicting readings of a text.
Hybridity:
Hybridity is about mixture, and, according to Robert Young, hybridity brings together and fuses but also maintains sepa- ration. Hybridity tries to create new spaces and places of discourse. Hybridity makes difference into sameness and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different.2
Imperialism:
The political and economic dominance of one nation over another. Imperialism tries to create an empire by conquering another’s land and state. There is some similarity between imperialism and colo- nialism. Imperialism involves the practice of one dominating group over a distant land while colonialism is about establishing settlements on a distant land. Imperialism includes colonialism, but colonialism does not always include imperialism.
Indecent Theology:
A form of liberation theology that includes the critical approaches of gender, queer, and postcolonial theories. It seeks to work toward liberating sexuality from heterosexual norms.
Intercultural Theology:
A theology that pays attention to the identity of non-European Christianity in dialogue with Western forms. It uses insights from sociocultural, interfaith dialogue, and history to understand the interaction of people across ethnicities and nationalities and God’s presence in their lives.
Intersectionality:
Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a tool for analysis and a problem-solving approach, biased toward justice, that holds multi- faceted identities and systems of oppression in mind as simultaneous and mutually shaping forces that situate people differently within the matrix of domination.
Liberation Theology:
Liberation theology arose in the 1960s with a focus on the poor and the political liberation of oppressed people. The father of liberation theology is usually understood as Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru, who understands poverty as a condition and emphasizes a “pref- erential option for the poor.”
Matrix of Domination:
Coined by Patricia Hill Collins, the organiza- tion of power, the means by which intersecting oppressions are regulated through social institutions such as the family, government, education, and religion.
Minjung Theology: A theology that emerged in the 1970s in Korea due to the oppressed experiences of South Korean Christians. The word min- jung means “people,” and minjung theology is a theology that seeks to liberate. Most recently, minjung theology focuses on the reunification of North and South Korea.
Mujerista Theology:
A US Latina theology that focuses on liberating Latina women from sexism, racism, and economic oppression. It is a the- ology that describes Latinas’ role in their struggle for liberation and free- dom and works to enable Latinas to gain economic, social, and political freedom.
Mythical Norm:
The accumulation of dominant identities to which accrues social, political, and economic power. Audre Lorde identifies this norm in US culture as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christ- ian, and financially secure.”3
Oppression:
Marilyn Frye traces the meaning of oppression to its root word, to press, to be caught between systematically related and interlock- ing barriers that constrain or prevent mobility.4 Suzanne Pharr explains that oppressions (sexism, racism, heterosexism, etc.) share a number of common elements: defined norms, institutional power, economic power, threats of violence, lack of prior claim, othering, invisibility, stereotyping, victim-blaming, horizontal hostility, isolation, assimila- tion, tokenism, and individual solutions.5
Postcolonial Feminism:
Postcolonial feminism emerged in the 1980s as a critique of the universalization of Western feminism and the misrep- resentation of women in non-Western countries. Postcolonial feminism understands that racism, politics, socioeconomic context, and culture all have an effect on nonwhite women in the postcolonial world.
Power:
Typically defined as “power-over,” the ability to coerce another’s behavior. Power also includes access to social, political, and economic resources. In systems of oppression, power accrues to those who most closely approximate the mythical norm—(in the United States) male, white, heterosexual, financially stable, young-middle adult, able-bodied, Christian. Social institutions (family, education, religion, media, govern- ment) reproduce hierarchy and ensure the maintenance of power in the hands of members of the dominant culture by normalizing the dominant culture so that hierarchical orderings based on gender, race, social class, and so forth appear natural and inevitable.
Praxis:
An action-reflection model that engages participants in an ongo- ing loop of active participation in making social change and reflection/ theorizing based on that experience that leads to more effective action.
Privilege:
Peggy McIntosh defines privilege as “an invisible package of unearned assets.” Privilege is those social goods we receive, not through work or merit, but through our membership in dominant groups. For example, white privilege means white people can go shopping alone and move about the store fairly well assured that they will not be followed by store detectives because of their race.
