THE INFERTILE WOMB OF GOD

Ableism in Feminist Doctrine of God

Lisa D. Powell

S ince its burgeoning in the 1970s and 80s, Christian feminist theology
has deployed a variety of metaphors and symbols to wrest conceptions
of God from the oppressive structures and formulations dominating
Christian thinking and worship. A significant focus of much of this early
work was on the exclusive use of masculine imagery and language for
God. Feminist theologians sought fresh symbols inclusive of women’s
experience. Quickly the work expanded not only to question patriarchy
in theology and Christian worship, but also to expose currents of white
supremacy in theology and theological institutions. In recent decades,
responding to queer theory, post-colonial theory, and ecology, feminist
theology discovers still more symbols to express the relationship between
God, humanity, and the cosmos in ways that do not perpetuate kyriarchy
but undermine those systems of power and oppression. One such chal-
lenge to rethink Christian systems comes from disability theory, which
exposes the ableist assumptions in theology that consecrate a norm con-
structed against differently abled persons; Christian disability theology
envisions new symbols for God that rebuff conceptions of power modeled
after a militarized ableist culture and fosters an understanding of power
appropriate to a religion in which God is disfigured on the cross, in
which God is even disabled.1
Disability theorists also probe feminist thought to expose the ableism
in its celebration of independence and the idealization of a certain form
of female embodiment, which reinforces the idea of a “normal” female
body. Even as feminism challenges society’s objectification of women and

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 LISA D. POWELL

its standards of beauty, disabled women find they do not embody the
feminist ideal. Susan Wendell critiques the exaltation in feminism of a
woman’s control of her body.2 She quotes Adrienne Rich, who writes in
Of Women Born: “In order to live a fully human life we require not only
control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the
unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order,
the corporeal ground of our intelligence.”3 Rich emphasizes our control
of our bodies and asserts a universal unity among women based in a
shared physiology. Rich’s volume, and many texts influenced by it, con-
tains this glorification of woman’s ability to control her body, particularly
when speaking about conception and birth, maintaining that women are
universally connected in their corporeal fertility. Wendell writes “Until
feminists criticize our own body ideals and confront the weak, suffering,
and uncontrollable body in our theorizing and practice, women with dis-
abilities and illness are likely to feel that we are embarrassments to femi-
nism.”4 Rosmarie Garland-Thompson makes a similar charge, instead
noting the idealization of self-sufficiency: “One of the most pervasive fem-
inist assumptions that undermines some disabled women’s struggle is the
liberal ideology of autonomy and independence that fuels the broader
impulse toward female empowerment.”5 Doreen Freeman brings these
critiques to thealogy and feminist theology, arguing that disabled women
“embody all that the blossoming feminist does not want to be,” as they
often “reinforce the stereotypes as ‘passive, dependent, needy’ recipients
of care.”6 She asks if thealogians can celebrate the body as an image of
the divine if it is a “deformed, leaky, sometimes smelly, constantly fati-
gued, psychotic, [and/or] dysfunctional body.”7 She charges that in its
emphasis on “wholeness of mind, body and spirit,” feminist theology cen-
ters on “goals of competence, wisdom and well being, [and] the flourish-
ing of the woman’s physical cycle,” which then marginalizes disabled
women. In the process, the disabled woman is “negated, isolated and
alienated.”8
Disability theory has yet to lay bare the implicit ableism in some
accounts of the doctrine of God in feminist theology, namely the image
of God as mother in the face of infertility. This essay exposes how Chris-
tian feminist theology glorified female fertility, grounding reconstruction
of the doctrine of God in this notion of a shared physiological capacity
for childbearing, thus negating the infertile woman, rendering her an

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invisible outsider. However, recent feminist theology exhibits a shift in

the way Christian theologians depict God as mother. This essay traces this
change in the use of mother imagery in the doctrine of God, argues for
infertility as a disabling condition in most cultures, including Christian
cultures, and highlights a few possible responses to the challenge infertil-
ity brings to constructions of the doctrine of God.

Disability theory
Current disability theory operates in three different models: medical,
social, and cultural models. The medical model, typically rejected by theo-
rists in the humanities and social sciences, views physical impairment as
a problem to be cured or fixed. It does not consider how social context
impacts the individual’s experience of impairment, such that the physical
condition may or may not be experienced as a disability. It does not
acknowledge how lack of accommodation in society makes some impair-
ments disabling and how cultural ideals and “norms” make disability in
some cases. For example, a strictly medical approach would identify a
person with temporal lobe epilepsy as one with an illness to be treated,
with the intent of stopping the seizures. However, in certain societies,
such an individual may be considered a visionary and not in need of a
cure.9 In contrast, the social model, which is used primarily by sociolo-
gists in the U.K., focuses solely on how society makes impairments into
disabilities, such as a person in a wheelchair has a different mode of
movement than an ambulatory person, but it is the lack of ramps or un-
dropped curbs that make the former embodiment into disability. The cul-
tural model, which is preferred in disability studies in religion and the
humanities generally, considers how the individual experiences different
embodiment in her social and cultural context. It will include the impact
society has on a person’s ability, the experience of impairment itself, and
cultural valuations of impairments as either “normal” or disableing: the
need for corrected vision vs. the need for hearing aids, for example. The
cultural model considers how society constructs the Normal in opposition
to difference,10 and how it prescribes the way in which one is to navigate
society as different: “whether or not to show shame, whether or not to
pass, whether to minimize or maximize the difference, and so on.”11
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s work in disability theory and feminist
disability studies challenges our cultural categories of able-bodied and

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physically disabled, exposing the way these categories are constructed

through an “exclusionary discourse” produced by “legal, medical, politi-
cal, cultural, and literary narratives.”12 I would add religious narratives to
her list. She examines the social valuation and devaluation of corporeal
diversity determined by “our accepted hierarchies of embodiment.”13
Garland-Thomson follows the work of Erving Goffman, asserting that the
“normate,” or the hegemony of the constructed Normal ideal, is “young,
married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of col-
lege education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height,
and a recent record in sports.”14 Note that the Normal here is a father. I
add that as feminism has idealized the womb and women’s reproductive
capacity as a supposed universal “woman power,” the female normate is
a mother or a woman with the potential for motherhood within her
womb. Garland-Thomson finds that “corporeal departures from dominant
expectations never go uninterpreted or unpunished, and conformities are
almost always rewarded.”15 The social expectation for women, especially
women in heterosexual marriages, is to reproduce; the inability to do so
results in stigmatization. Interestingly, while Garland-Thomson finds
motherhood “compulsory for women, disabled women are often denied
or discouraged from the reproductive role that some feminist thinkers
find oppressive.”16
Susan Wendell’s work fits with the cultural model, as she reminds us
that even the determination of which abilities is considered normal and
basic is largely “relative to the environment in which the abilities are
exercised.”17 She uses as an example her ability to walk half a mile
several times a week but not more. This would not be considered a
significant disability in her urban Canadian society, but if she were a
woman of rural Kenya, where women walk miles twice a day to obtain
water for the household, she would be severely disabled as she would
“need constant assistance to carry on the most basic life activities.”18
Many women living in industrialized contexts would be considered dis-
abled if they lived in a society where they had to grow their own food,
build fires for cooking, wash clothes by hand in water they hauled over
hills. We are dependent upon many things: running water available
inside our homes, cars, supermarkets, refrigerators, and central heating.
We are not truly independent as we like to imagine, and we will become
even more dependent as we age, or because of an injury. Those

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considered able-bodied are most likely nothing more than temporarily so,
and so are often referred to as “temporarily able-bodied” in the work of
disability theory.19 “Unless we die suddenly, we are all disabled eventu-
ally,” says Wendell. “Most of us will live part of our lives with bodies that
hurt, that move with difficulty or not at all, that deprive us of activities
we once took for granted, or that others take for granted. . .”20 Addition-
ally, all fertile bodies will lose their fertility. Our paradigm for feminist
theology should not be of a young, healthy, fecund, independent female
body. The physiology of female bodies is not fixed and constant and can-
not serve as a ground for the unity of the female body or women’s expe-
rience. Female bodies are different from one another, bearing different
capacities based on context, societal expectations, and physiology.21

Infertility as disability
Legally, according to the U.S. Supreme Court Ruling in 1998, infertility is
included as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act of
1990.22 According to the ADA for something to qualify as a protected dis-
ability there must be: “(1) a physical or mental impairment that substan-
tially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual; (2)
a record of such an impairment; or (3) being regarded as having such an
impairment.” The document further lists what are considered “major life
activities,” including “reproductive functions” in this list as a “major bod-
ily function.”23
In the discipline of religious studies, biblical studies attends more to
disability studies than do other sub-disciplines. This is particularly true of
studies in the Hebrew Bible, though a growing body of work engages the
New Testament and disability.24 There is little doubt infertility is a disabil-
ity in the context of the Ancient Near East; numerous studies confirm
this and agree that this corresponds with the cultural expectation that
the normative role for woman was wife and mother.25 Rebecca Raphael,
for example, writes that “an understanding of disability as bodily impair-
ment in the context of social environment reveals that female infertil-
ity. . . is the defining female disability in the Hebrew Bible (and in other
ancient Near Eastern literature).”26 Carole R. Fontaine concurs, calling
infertility in ancient Israel “an ultimate handicap in a cultural perfor-
mance of woman.”27 Also working within the cultural model, Jeremy
Schipper notes that in biblical literature, the experience of infertility is

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more than a “biological anomaly.” As an example of the experience of

infertility as disabling, he considers the experience of Hannah of 1 Sam-
uel, as she was ridiculed for her infertility by her “sister wife.” Hannah’s
social context exacerbated her suffering such that the biblical writer says
it made her “heart sad” (v.8), and that she “wept and would not eat”(v. 7).
The writer “describes her experience of infertility and not the causes of
her infertility,” saying that “she is ‘deeply distressed’ (v. 10), in a state of
‘misery’ (v.11) and ‘deeply troubled’ (v.15).”28
Hector Avalos, scholar of health care and illness in the Ancient Near
East, writes that any deviation from a culture’s account of a “normal life”
that is “linked with the malfunction of normal bodily processes” may be
considered an illness.29 According to Avalos, the physical “malfunction”
of the womb or another physiological reproductive limit for women
struggling with infertility (excluding age) medically situates infertility in
the illness or disease category even in modern society. Hebrew scholar
Bruce C. Birch, however, does not see infertility as illness and certainly
not as disability in contemporary society, though he concedes that it was
in ancient Israel. “Infertility was almost always listed as a major disability
for women because the ancient social stigma was so great when a
woman’s major role was defined as contingent on childbearing. Modern
women may experience such a condition as a major sorrow but would
not usually consider themselves disabled, at least in societies with
expanded opportunities for women.”30 His assessment of women’s experi-
ence of infertility in modernity not only ignores the medical causes
of infertility, but also the social, cultural, and psychological experience of
it.
The experience of high levels of psychological distress among infer-
tile women and couples is well documented in psychology, sociology, and
medical journals.31 Studies in these fields confirm that although infertil-
ity is a medical condition, social and cultural factors significantly impact
a persons’ experience of it. Parenthood is highly valued in most societies
and is an expectation of married heterosexual couples and women; fail-
ure to reproduce can often lead to stigmatization, “meaning that it can
be seen as a ‘deviant behaviour’ from the social norm.”32 According to
James Monarch, author of Childless: No Choice: The Experience of Involuntary
Childlessness, those who do not or cannot have children “find themselves
—or feel themselves to be—devalued as full members of society. They

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may feel excluded and stigmatized by the ‘freemasonry of the fertile.’”33

The infertile feel themselves “bombarded with attitudes and images that
value parenthood and devalue non-parenthood.”34 Sources of this
onslaught include “literature, popular culture, daily discourse, legislation,
and education.”35 Monarch does not include religious life, but surely the
pressure in many religions for couples to reproduce is felt intensely. The
blessing of the couple for future children persists in some liturgies of
Christian matrimony, for example. Couples and women in Catholic or
conservative protestant cultures that foster the anticipation of children
through the doctrine of complementarity may especially feel the pressure
of this expectation, as well a deep longing to fulfill the role. Note that
the language used to describe the experience of infertility mirrors that
utilized by disability theorists. For example, Garland-Thomson employs
stigma theory to analyze the construction of disabled identities and she
notes, like Monarch on infertility, that disability is “the attribution of
corporeal deviance—not so much a property of bodies as a product of
cultural rules about what bodies should be or do.”36
The experience of women and couples desiring children but suffering
infertility is marked by distress, anxiety, and often shame over their
bodies, which compels many to hide their loss. They often feel a deep
sense of failure to achieve this important and anticipated life role and
goal; infertility requires them to reconceive their future and self-image.
Women endure extensive tests and procedures in an effort to overcome
their physiological barriers to conception and healthy gestation, including
hormone shots that can produce extreme emotional and psychological
stress. Additionally, the cost of infertility treatments can burden women
and couples with large debt and intensify the anxiety over whether or
not said treatment will produce a viable pregnancy. Studies show that the
levels of depression in infertile women are comparable to those in indi-
viduals with chronic illnesses such as cancer and HIV-positive status.37
They also show a significant loss to self-esteem, a rise in anxiety, and a
general sense of life dissatisfaction.38 Infertility then does potentially fall
within the category of disability, culturally defined. It is a corporeal devia-
tion, devalued socially, and leads to stigmatization in many social and
religious groups.
As is true with other disabilities, a woman may or may not experi-
ence infertility as a disability. Some women do not want children or have

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never sought pregnancy and so do not even know if their body is thus
“impaired.” However, in cultures where women’s primary social roles
continue to be mothering, caretaking of family, and work in the home, it
is likely that infertility will be experienced as disability. Many industrial-
ized Western societies are also still pronatalist, where women are espe-
cially valued for their function as mothers. In the U.S., this is evidenced
in the attention given to the so-called “mommy-wars” and the ongoing
legislation over women’s reproductive rights, where the focus in govern-
ment, society, and culture remains on women’s wombs. This includes cul-
tural obsessions with celebrity pregnancies, the debate on whether or not
women can “have it all,” and the peculiar scrutiny given to female CEO’s
maternity.39
For some percentage of women, maternity may be a choice; they
desire pregnancy and offspring, and they gain both, yet it is not some-
thing women work at, can control, or claim as their own.40 It either is or
is not part of one’s particular bodily capacity at a given point in time. Per-
haps modern technology may help some bodies nurture life that other-
wise could not, but in and of itself, whether or not one’s womb can
foster life and bring another human into the world is beyond one’s
control. But as disability studies expose, our culture likes to believe we
control our bodies, that our health and our bodily capacities are some-
thing for which we work and something in which we take pride. Speak-
ing of this illusion of control, Wendell writes: “Like many myths, the
myth of control contains a significant element of truth; we do have some
control over the conditions of our bodies, for example through the physi-
cal risks we take or avoid and our care for our health. What makes it a
myth is that people continue to cling to it even where there is over-
whelming evidence against it.”41 We have no control over our genetic
composition and have little control over debilitating illness, disease, and
the general process of aging itself. While feminists have “criticized and
worked to undo men’s control of women’s bodies,” they have not con-
fronted and subverted “the myth that women can control our own
bodies.”42 Female embodiment, idealized in much work as that of inde-
pendent and autonomous subjects, cannot be the base for feminist theol-
ogy. The idea that a “normal” woman possesses control over her fertility
is false.43 She cannot simply choose to conceive and to bring forth life;
that is not a female power as much as we may like it to be.

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The elevation of female fertility as a woman-power over which she

has control bears similarities to Augustine’s conception of coitus in The
City of God, where he envisions pre-fall procreation. Then, the generative
organs respond to a decision of the will. Of course he focuses entirely on
male reproductive organs in his concern that they do not respond to the
will like other muscles and are instead moved by lust. In the garden,
man would choose to implant his seed and with each insemination, life
would form, gestate, and spring forth. Humans (or at least in Augustine’s
vision—men) would have utter control over their bodies and reproduc-
tion, so that they could decide to engender offspring, and as a result,
their members would do their will and life would be formed. There is
nothing involved that is out of one’s control or will.44 Similar is the idea
that we control our reproductive capacity, such that the power to bring
forth life in the womb is naturally a power of the female body, over
which she has control. However, women do not have control over this
capacity; it is not her inherent power. Some bodies can conceive, foster
life, birth, and lactate, but even then only for a span of time, not for the
entirety of even the most fertile woman’s life.

Infertility and the doctrine of God

Rebecca Raphael argues that religions typically depict their deities with
those attributes that are favored in that society, including ideals of
human embodiment and experience. She traces this through the Hebrew
Bible, finding that the depictions of God therein portray God as anthropo-
morphically “Normal,” enforcing the normate.45 “The Hebrew Bible repre-
sents God with the abilities it most values in the human (male) body. It
multiplies these, perhaps infinitely, but that fact has no bearing on the
source of the images.”46 God is depicted according to the ideal Normal of
the culture that is endeavoring to describe their God; this persists in
Christian theologies since its inception. Raphael identifies how biblical
writers conscripted the disabled body to serve as God’s opposite in order
to display a God that is “holy and powerful.”47 She rightly identifies a
link between theological descriptions of God with the ideology of the
Normal in a given social context. Christian feminist depictions of God
have participated in this reinscription of the Norm as ablebodied, even as
it moved theological images away from the normate of the heterosexual
male.

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Early feminist theology offered a connection between God and

women’s experience in a way previously ignored in academic publication.
God was no longer “Father”, but Mother, Goddess, Sophia, Friend, and on.
A diversity of metaphors and models were introduced to shake people
from their patriarchal complacency. Theologians uncovered biblical refer-
ences to the womb of God and to the mothering activities of God and
Jesus. They proclaimed the ways in which God sustains life from God’s
very being as analogous to a mother feeding a child at her breast. Femi-
nist theology emerged from the watery rush of the Second Wave, declar-
ing the birth of the cosmos from the womb of God. Some of the most
influential texts from those early decades build on the image of God as
mother typically in two ways: first, by reconceiving the Christian doctrine
of creation to image creation as something God does within the divine
being, so that God may be thought of as a womb that births creation and
nourishes us from God’s own self. Second, by focusing on the way that
God cares for creation and humanity such that God’s care is like that of a
mother, often portrayed as nurturing and sheltering. Through the work
of these theological pioneers, many women were freed to worship God in
love, throwing off the oppressive chains of the patriarchal God of most
traditional and orthodox Christian systematic theologies.
Thanks to the work of these trailblazing feminist theologians the idea
of God as Mother has become widely accepted so that the metaphor has
become standard in many theology texts and made its way into many
mainline liturgies, typically in prayers to “God the mother and father of
us all.” The experience of human motherhood as conception, gestation,
birth, lactation and tender childrearing continues in contemporary theol-
ogy to be a popular image for God’s creation of the universe and care
and sustenance of it.
Early Christian feminist theology elevated the woman’s role of mother-
hood and identified the power to produce and nourish life within the
womb as a foundation of woman’s particular power, linking this to the doc-
trine of God and God’s relationship to creation. Sallie McFague’s famous
Models of God included the model of God as Mother, explicitly rooting this
model in the experience of women’s bodies. There she expounds the model
of God as Mother and relates this to her idea of the cosmos as the “body of
God,” also speaking of creation from the “womb of God, formed through
‘gestation’.”48 She writes, the physical act of giving birth “is the base from

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which this model derives its power,” as “in the acts of conception, gesta-
tion, and birth,” all the great “symbols of life and of life’s continuity” are
involved.49 McFague stresses here that this model springs from the female
corporeal experience of gestation, birth, and lactation. A sampling of other
early feminist theologians building on this image include Elizabeth John-
son who devotes a chapter to “Mother-Sophia” in her groundbreaking study
of Sophia, She Who Is.50 Rosemary Radford Ruether’s foundational text Sex-
ism and Godtalk, introduces God as the Primal Matrix, also described as
“womb” within which all is generated and has life.51 Margaret Hebblewaite,
whose reflection on her own experience as a mother, produced Motherhood
and God.52 Finally, Concilium dedicated a volume to investigating the links
between motherhood and theology, responding to Adrienne Rich’s impor-
tant feminist text, Of Woman Born.53
Oftentimes, the proposal of a mothering metaphor coincides with a
rejection of another model labeled “masculine.” This is evident in
McFague’s Models, where she rejects the artist-model of God’s creation,
which pictured creation as “an intellectual, aesthetic ‘act’ of God, accom-
plished through God’s word and wrought by God’s ‘hands’, much as a
painting is created by an artist or a form by a sculptor.”54 She submits her
model of God as mother to contrast this. Similar critiques of orthodox
descriptions of creation are levied by process theologians Monica Coleman
and Catherine Keller. At a recent meeting of the American Academy of
Religion where theologians debated creatio ex nihilo, Coleman and Keller
denounced the doctrine as a masculine image of creation.55 According to
creatio ex nihilo, God creates outside of Godself, separate from Godself, by a
fiat of power; this is deemed a masculine way of viewing God’s act of crea-
tion. In contrast, the above theologians explore images that closer reflect
female experience of life growing in the womb and birth. Keller in Face of
the Deep, for example, likens the primordial chaos of Genesis 1 to “a hetero-
geneous womb” and “maternal floods.”56 She expounds the development
of the doctrine of creation in explicitly gendered terms and submits her
proposal using intentional gendered imagery and language. Keller contrasts
the “unilateral, masculinizing creativity”57 of creatio ex nihilo with her
watery, wet, chaos of “beginning-in-process” or becoming.58 Even the term
“creator” itself is too masculine for Keller as it connotes “a great supernatu-
ral surge of father-power,. . .[and] a mankind ruling the world in our manly
creator’s image.”59

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Current trends in feminist theology

For women whose water will never break forth life into the world, the
images to which their female embodiment may more relate include the
artist and the “brain child” most often relinquished in our theologies to
the doctrines of God deemed “masculine.” Even beyond the essentialism
behind divine traits labeled “masculine” and others “feminine” or “mater-
nal,” whose experience are we prescribing as “normal” when we say the
carpenter image of creation is of a masculine God, for example, or when
the artist creator or God making with “God’s hands” are understood nec-
essarily as masculine images of God?
Moria Gatens in Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality argues
that the sexed body is not a reliable constant. She identifies two ways
feminists have typically looked at female embodiment. First are those like
Simone de Beauvoir, whom she identifies with negative views of female
embodiment through the shared idea that women cannot gain true equal-
ity until women are not the sole bearers of children. Second are those
who affirm and celebrate “women’s bodies and their capacity to recreate
and nurture”, and who argue that “the specific capacities and powers of
women’s bodies imply an essential difference between men and women,”
and they thus insist that sexual difference should be retained.60 Gatens,
however, encourages an alternative, a view of the body and power that
refuses this dualism of sexual difference. She argues that the history of
the body must take “seriously the ways in which diet, environment and
the typical activities of a body may vary historically and create its capaci-
ties, its desires and its actual material form.”61 She contrasts the body of
a stay-at-home wife and mother or a domestic worker with a female
Olympian. Each she says, “is invested with particular desires, capacities
and forms,” but “the female Olympic athlete may have more in common
with a male . . . athlete than with a wife/mother. [And] this commonality
is not simply at the level of interests or desires but at the level of the
actual form [of the body] and capacities of the body.”62
Iris Marion Young asserts that “Women in sexist societies are physi-
cally handicapped.”63 In sexist societies, “a ‘normal’ woman is expected
to lack strength, skills, and the range of movement that ‘normal’ men
are expected to possess and that she might have developed had she
grown up in a less sexist society. If we accept these standards uncritically,
we will tend to overlook the ways that those societies create physical

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disadvantages for women.”64 I am reminded of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I

A Woman” speech where she says “Look at me! Look at my arm! I have
ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head
me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as
a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a
woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slav-
ery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard
me! And ain’t I a woman?”65 Truth challenges the assumption that a
female body is weak by asserting her own physical strength and stamina,
her muscular arm. Yet, she also shares the womb and childbearing with
other women.
Women’s bodily experience is sometimes and not always different
from men, but women’s bodily experience is also different from other
women’s bodily experience.66 The universalizing of “women’s experience”
has been challenged since the Second Wave. So too now universalizing
about female embodiment is challenged and should be especially as it
has become foundational to discussions of the relation between the
female experience and God. Bodies change over time. Even for women
who are fertile, they are only so for a limited span of time, approximately
thirty years of a woman’s life. This idea of women as essentially life-givers
discounts long periods when they are not fertile (if they ever are): child-
hood and life after menopause. Are these not part of the experience of
female embodiment, or are they only pre-fertility and post-fertility? How
can this experience, which is rooted in physiology, a capacity shared by
only some women and only for a fraction of those women’s bodily life,
serve as the foundation for women’s connection to creation and to God?
The image may open the doctrine of God to incorporate some women’s
experience of gestation and childbirth, yet many women will not, and
their bodies will not allow them to, produce life within themselves. Infer-
tility has been associated with disability since before the writing of the
Hebrew bible and continues to be. It may be a disability that allows one
to “pass” as able-bodied in modern Western culture, but an infertile
woman in her prime is nonetheless incapable of doing what is deemed
“normal” for the female body. When feminist theology repeatedly returns
to women’s ability to give life in the womb or nurture life from the
breast, it marginalizes particularly those women whose bodies do not.
The elevation of female fertility as a model of God, grounded in an

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assumed shared female physiology, reinforces what is considered norma-

tive for the female body, thus assigning the infertile female to the caste
of the corporeal deviant, the stigmatized.
Doreen Freeman in “A Feminist Theology of Disability” asserts: “Femi-
nist theology and thealogy will be more complete for me when they ana-
lyse the arbitrariness of some people’s bodily functions a little more. The
more we make vulnerable, suffering bodies visible the more we will face
up to our own deterioration and society’s lack of provision for the dis-
abled and the aged and the lack of discourse about illnesses.”67 Feminist
theology has begun to shift away from the glorification of maternity and
the universalizing of women’s bodily experience in pregnancy and birth.
Further work remains, however, to develop theologies that make visible
the perspective of the disabled and infertile.
Feminist theology has developed significantly from the first asser-
tions of the motherhood of God and the essentializing elevation of God’s
feminine nurturing.
In more recent years, Christian feminist theology is advancing
beyond this link between the experience of gestation and birth to the
doctrine of God and creation. This is first evident in the string of dis-
claimers prefacing the employment of the metaphor in most feminist
theology. For example, in her 2011 book, Quest for the Living God, Elizabeth
Johnson provides multiple warnings about the metaphor of God as
Mother before developing her treatment of it.68 Likewise, both Ruether
and McFague warn that an emphasis on parental imagery places human-
ity always in the role of children, when we should be responsible and not
relate only to God as the paternal or maternal figure who fixes our mis-
takes. Similarly, Elisabeth Schu€ ssler Fiorenza warns against exclusive use
of mother language for God as it could then serve to support gender bina-
ries and perpetuate kyriarchy.69 Offering a few sentences of disclaimer
before a lengthy treatment of the image or encouraging of multiplicity
without truly upsetting the stability of this model, however, doesn’t pre-
vent the metaphor from becoming what the authors warn against.
Another possible approach to gendered and sexed metaphors in the-
ology is found in Catherine Keller’s recent shift away from identifying
the masculine and feminine metaphors in theology, so explicit in her
2003 book Face of the Deep. Despite her link between cosmic beginnings
and the womb there and in her 2010 essay “Tangles of Unknowing,”70

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her most recent work seeks an apophasis of gender, described as an

unknowing and unsaying of gender and sexes, in order to embrace “the
manifold,” a position she calls “transfeminism.”71 Whether the inquiry is
into “God, Man, or Woman,” Keller’s theological apophasis calls for a
“critical uncertainty” that then “clouds any absolutes of gender, and
therewith any certainties about the boundary between culture and nat-
ure, logos, and biology.”72 Disability theologian Sharon Betcher, however,
raises concern with Keller’s proposal. Betcher writes: “Yet living in a cul-
ture that uses disability as a social and/or economic structure of exclu-
sion, disappearing the disabled into the apophatic ‘cloud of unknowing’
will not wholly suffice. Apophatic unknowing could further suppress that
which culture holds abject.”73 Not enough progress has been made in cul-
tural awareness of ableism and the culture’s determination of disability
and the normate to utterly blur nature and culture in a dark optimistic
cloud.
Another possible corrective to this focus on Mother is through less
anthropocentric methaphors and models, something evidenced in ecofe-
minism, and demonstrated in Sallie McFague’s Body of God. Though she
does not retract her models of God as Mother, Lover, and Friend, which
are important for showing God’s intimacy with the cosmos, she seeks to
balance them with other organic models.74 She again rejects the architect
model “where the world and its creatures are products of God the Maker,
the Craftsman, the Architect, the Sculptor” because creation remains
external to God.75 And she again proposes Mother as a preferable model
because it maintains the dependency of creation on God, but also has an
organic connection. She qualifies this procreation model, however, by
combining it with an emanation model, such that creation continues to
be utterly dependent upon the life of God, unlike the relationship of
mother to child. The birthing model illustrates the cosmos emerging
from the abundant life of God but then separating as independent from
her. Though a baby continues to be nourished from the mother’s breast
for a time, the ongoing connection is not as dynamic as that with God, in
whom we continue to live and move and have our being. Describing this
birth as an emanation, then, serves as a corrective. Another shift in McFa-
gue’s use of birth and motherhood in the doctrine of God comes in “The
World as God’s Body” published in Concillium in 2002, where she contin-
ues to employ images of birth from God, expounding on the notion of

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 LISA D. POWELL

the continual substance of the cosmos from God’s body, without use of
the terms “mother” or “womb.”76
Similar to McFague resisting the identification of the womb with a
particular sexed embodiment, other theologians focus on parenting more
generally, not identifying traits, roles, or features with a particular sexed
parent. Karen Baker-Fletcher, for example, in Dancing with God: The Trinity
from a Womanist Perspective, analyses the “first person” of the trinity as
“Provider/Nurturer,” noting that both a mother and a father function in
this way as parent, and that “neither term refers to one gender or
another.”77 Initially, she seems to simply bracket the discussion of sex
and gender, saying: “Rather than wrestle with gendered language, this
theology refers to the first relational agent of the Trinity as Parent.” How-
ever, she does eventually talk about God as a mother, but she does so
uniquely, highlighting the communal aspect of raising a child. She says
God “is like the poor mothers of the globe, who with other women in
their families or communities pull a scarcity of resources together to pro-
duce a context of substance for the young.”78 In her trinitarian frame-
work, she describes mothering as a community, distancing it from the
image of the solitary mother who gives birth, nurses at her breast, and
raises her child. Here, neighbors, relatives, and friends mother together,
and too God, as mother, work with others to provide and care for the
community. Equally important to our argument here is that her model is
one of inter-dependence; neither mothers, nor God, are solitary figures of
power and independence, but exist in networks of inter-dependencies.
Disability theologian, Nancy Eielsand also constructed an influential
interpretation of the doctrine of God highlighting inter-dependence, by
considering the humanity that the Son returns to God at the ascension.
She notes that in the book of John, Jesus’ resurrected body remains bro-
ken. Jesus’ wounds are not healed or erased. He takes his broken body to
God so that the humanity of God is broken, marred, disfigured. She con-
cludes, then, that God is disabled, and she elucidates what this means for
the being of God.
“The disabled God is God for whom interdependence is not a possi-
bility to be willed from a position of power, but a necessary condi-
tion for life. This interdependence is the fact of both justice and
survival. The disabled God embodies practical interdependence, not
simply willing to be interrelated from a position of power, but

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THE INFERTILE WOMB OF GOD

depending on it from a position of need. For many people with dis-

abilities, to, mutual care is a matter of survival. To posit a Jesus
who needs care and mutuality as essential to human-divine survival
does not symbolize either humanity or divinity as powerless.
Instead it debunks the myth of individualism and hierarchical
orders, in which transcendence means breaking free of encumber-
ances and needing nobody and constitutes the divine as somebody
in relation to other bodies.”79
God does not work solely, unilaterally, and alone, as the supreme
monad. God as triune holds existence in inter-dependencies. God is
dependent within the life of God on each triune person to pour out life
into each other, and within the economy, God is dependent on each tri-
une person to do her or his part, working together to accomplish a com-
mon redemptive goal. God is even dependent upon humanity to work
with her Spirit to bring creation toward fulfillment, and creation is in
turn dependent upon God for life and sustenance. We are dependent
upon a whole network to bring forth life and nurture it. The world is cre-
ated as a network of inter-dependencies, mirroring a God who is inter-
dependent, who carries out her work through dependencies. Our images
of God should reflect this, moving away from images drawn from ableist
Western ideals of the autonomous subject with absolute control that then
hold these same ideals for human existence and female experience.
One final approach beneficial for infertile and other disabled women
is the provocation instigated by queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid,
whose work presents “feminists with a tantalizing challenge: she asked
us all to face the vulva and get over the womb.”80 Queer theory can be a
companion to disability theory because both combat the hegemony of
“Normal,” be it heteronormativity or the “normate” described by Gar-
land-Thompson. Queer theories, according to Donald Hall, “work to chal-
lenge and undercut any attempt to render ‘identity’ singular, fixed, or
normal.”81 In fact, Robert McRuer, author of Crip Theory, finds the cultural
and social forces that stigmatize the disabled to be the same that stigma-
tize the queer. He argues that “the system of compulsory able-bodiedness,
which in a sense produces disability, is thoroughly interwoven with the
system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness: that, in
fact, compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on compulsory able-bodi-
edness, and vice versa.”82

132 . CROSSCURRENTS
 LISA D. POWELL

Althaus-Reid calls theologians to queer God in order to break open

theologies to the voice of those kept on the margins of orthodox system-
atic theology. She radically and provocatively disturbs orthodox represen-
tations of God, recognizing that the way to put an end to “the hegemonic
pattern of androcentric theology” is “to allow a complete redefinition of
the theological representation of God.”83 Along with Lisa Isherwood, she
critiques Christian theology for assuming that which “is temporary and
culturally organized in an ideological frame” to be “normal” and “natu-
ral.”84 She says “The point in Queer theology is a resistance to normativi-
ty and a subversion of the politics of representation which are essentialist
and reductionist.”85 And she asks how our cultural, social, political, and
theological assumptions of hetero-normal identities “preempt” Christian
reflection on God and the primary themes of Christianity.86 Althaus-
Reid’s project was to deconstruct “heterosexual epistemology and presup-
positions in theology” while also “unveiling the different, the suppressed
face of God amidst it.”87 She uncovered ways in which theology had con-
structed hierarchies of sexual ordering, disguised as doctrine or interpre-
tation of the bible. Christian disability theology calls for the same: (1) to
resist normativity, (2) to subvert the reductionistic and essentialist repre-
sentations of the disabled body, (3) to expose the ways in which theology
has perpetuated the normate as an able-bodied, independent, fertile,
white productive male, (4) and to illuminate the beauty of the disfigured,
infertile, and dependent within God, the bible, and Christianity.
When motherhood is rooted in a supposed shared embodiment of
women, it is fashioned over against bodies that are not fertile and thus
cast as abnormal. Theologies seeking to avoid marginalizing the infertile
should move away from identifying the womb of God with the womb of
female embodiment. Here, Queer theology can again assist in the resis-
tance against normativity; we should queer or “trans” our doctrine of
God. I conclude that if we choose to retain the mother and father titles
and images for God, we must “trouble” them such that: The divine
mother protects us with her strong arm; the father nurtures us in his
womb; or even better: the mother feeds us at his breast; the father guides
us in her wisdom. The mother comforts us at his side. The father calls
us her beloved. The mother leads us in his righteousness. These images
cannot be assumed to promote gender norms and essential sexual
difference.88 To keep gendered pronouns tied to mother and father in

MARCH 2015 . 133

THE INFERTILE WOMB OF GOD

traditional ways stabilizes the metaphor and keeps it from serving

the function of a true metaphor, while simultaneously buttressing the
“hierarchy of bodily traits.”89
In order to avoid the glorification of just another form of power and
ableism, we must seek out alternative metaphors and trouble the ones
we have, following Nancy Eiesland who imaged God in a wheelchair. No
longer should the image of the divine mother assume its foundation for
metaphorical power in female pregnancy and birth as an act of will,
rooted in a natural physical ability. Instead, our images should move
from idealizing maternity and ableist control to include dependence and
inter-dependences in our doctrine of God itself. And I hope in our theolo-
gies we can stop relegating all images of God creating outside Godself
with mind or word or as an artist to masculine experience and instead
celebrate the many ways that women produce with hand and thought
and language and womb.

Notes
1. See Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 1994).
2. Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York:
Routledge, 1996).
3. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company,1976), 21.
4. Wendell, The Rejected Body, 93.
5. Rosmarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Cul-
ture and Literature (New York City: Columbia University Press, 1997), 26.
6. Doreen Freeman, “A Feminist Theology of Disability,” Feminist Theology 29 (2002): 71–85,
quotation on 77.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. This example comes from Rebecca Raphael, Biblical Corpora: Representations of Disability in
Hebrew Biblical Literature (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 116.
10. I use a capital “Normal” here and elsewhere to indicate the sociologically constructed
ideology of “normal,” following Rebecca Raphael, Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical
Literature.
11. Rebecca Raphael, Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature, 9.
12. Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 6.
13. Ibid., 7.
14. Ibid., 32, quoting Erving Goffman Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (Engle-
wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 128.
15. Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 7.

134 . CROSSCURRENTS
 LISA D. POWELL

16. Ibid, 26.

17. Wendell, The Rejected Body,16.
18. Ibid., 14.
19. Abbreviated TAB.
20. Wendell, The Rejected Body,18.
21. For more on the social construction of the physiological performance of the female
body, see Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body
Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and
Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
22. The U.S. Supreme Court found reproduction to be a “major life activity” under the ADA
in Bragdon v. Abbott (524 US 624) in 1999. The courts have yet to establish, however, that this
requires health insurance to cover infertility treatments under the law.
23. Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, S. 933, section 12102 http://www.ada.gov/pubs/
adastatute08.htm#12102
24. See Disability Studies and Biblical Literature, eds. Candida R. Moss and Jeremy Schipper
(NYC: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), which provides a balance of studies in both Hebrew Bible
and New Testament/Early Christianity.
25. One contrary voice is that of Joel S. Baben in “The Nature of Barrenness in the Hebrew
Bible: in Disability Studies and Biblical Literature eds. Candida R. Moss and Jeremy Schipper
(NYC: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13–27. Baben argues that because numerous women in the
Hebrew Bible are described as infertile and because both fertility and infertility are under-
stood as given by God, fertility itself is not simply natural or “norm” in that context.
26. Raphael, Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature, 57–8. See also Neal H.
Walls “The Origins of the Disabled Body: Disability in Ancient Mesopotamia” in This Abled
Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies, eds. Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy
Schipper (Atlanta, Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 13–30, esp. 27.
27. Carole R. Fontaine “‘Be Men, O Philistines!’ (1 Samuel 4:9): Iconographic Representations
and Reflections of Female Gender as Disability in the Ancient World” in This Abled Body:
Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies, eds. Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy Schip-
per (Atlanta, Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 61–72, quotation on 71. See also Susan Ack-
erman, “The Blind, the Lame, and the Barren Shall Not Come into the House” in Disability
Studies and Biblical Literature, eds. Candida R. Moss and Jeremy Schipper (NYC: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2011), 29–45. She traces the exclusion of infertile women from the sanctuary and
sacred spaces in ancient Israel, documenting further the marginalization of “barren women”
in that context. Also Jeremy Schipper, “Disabling Israelite Leadership: 2 Samuel 6:23 and
Other Images of Disability in the Deuteronomistic History” in This Abled Body: Rethinking Dis-
abilities in Biblical Studies, eds. Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper (Atlanta,
Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 103–113, esp. 105.
28. Jeremy Schipper, Disability & Isaiah’s Suffering Servant (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 21.
29. Hector Avalos, Illness and Healthcare in the Ancient Near East: The Role of the Temple in Greece,
Mesopotamia, and Israel (Atlanta: Harvard Semitic Monographs, Scholars Press), 331.
30. Bruce C. Birch, “Impairment as a Condition in Biblical Scholarship: A Response” This
Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies, eds. Hector Avalos, Sarah J. Melcher,

MARCH 2015 . 135

THE INFERTILE WOMB OF GOD

and Jeremy Schipper (Atlanta, Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 185–195, quotation on
189.
31. See Arthur L. Greil, Kathleen Slauson-Blevins, and Julia McQuillan, “The Experience of
Infertility: a review of recent literature,” Sociology of Health & Illness 32, no. 1 (Jan 2010): 140–
162.
32. M. Moura-Ramos, S. Gameiro, M.C. Canavarro, I. Soares, T.A. Santos, “The indirect effect
of contextual factors on the emotional distress of infertile couples,” Psychology & Health 27,
no. 5 (May 2012): 533–549.
33. Jim Monarch, “Stress and Distress,” Therapy Today 17, no. 8 (Oct. 2006): 24–27. See also
James H. Monarch, Childless: No Choice: The Experience of Involuntary Childlessness (London: Routl-
edge, 2003).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 6.
37. Laura M Miles, Merle Keitel, Margo Jackson, Abigail Harris, Fred Licciardi, “Predictors of
distress in women being treated for infertility” Journal of Reproductive & Infant Psychology 27,
no. 3 (Aug 2009): 238–257, quotation on 238.
38. Ibid. See also Minden B. Sexton, Michelle R. Byrd, William T. O’Donohue, and Negar
Nicole Jacobs, “Web-based treatment for infertility-related psychological distress” Archives of
Women’s Mental Health 13 (August 1, 2010):347–358.
39. Media outlets’ focus on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s pregnancy instead of her qualifica-
tions serves as an example.
40. Here I do not mean child-rearing, which is certainly a choice, something at which one
does work, but pregnancy, gestation, and healthy birth.
41. Wendell, The Rejected Body, 94.
42. Ibid., 93.
43. I am not making an argument here in the ongoing debate between feminism and dis-
ability activism over abortion.
44. Augustine, City of God, Book XIV. Chapter 26.
45. Raphael writes, “Normal is an ideological construct, not our colloquial sense of normal
as roughly average or typical. However, these terms are related in that a desired portion of
human experience is selected, idealized, and elevated to form the ideologically Normal,”
(Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature,136).
46. Raphael, Representations of Disability in Hebrew Biblical Literature,137.
47. Ibid.
48. Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1987), 110.
49. Ibid, 105.
50. Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York:
The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992).
51. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and Godtalk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1983).
52. Margaret Hebblethwaite, Motherhood and God (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1984).

136 . CROSSCURRENTS
 LISA D. POWELL

53. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Concilium: Mother-
€ ssler Fiorenza (Edin-
hood: Experience, Institution, Theology, ed. Anne Carr and Elisabeth Schu
burgh: T& T Clark, 1989). Recall that Rich’s book is directly critiqued by Susan Wendell’s
assessment of feminist thought from the perspective of disabled women.
54. McFague, Models of God, 106.
55. Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion 2011. The video recording of their
prepared statements for the session is available at http://www.ctr4process.org/media/
56. Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: a theology of becoming (London: Routledge, 2003).
57. Ibid., 17.
58. Ibid., xvii.
59. Ibid, 6. See also Mary Grey, Introducing Feminist Images of God (Cleveland: The Pilgrim
Press, 2001), pp. 20–28.
60. Moria Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (New York: Routledge, 1995),
68.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid, 69. Gatens: “difference does not have to do with biological ‘facts’ so much as with
the manner in which culture marks bodies and creates specific conditions in which they live
and recreate themselves” (71).
63. Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comport-
ment, Motility, and Spatiality,” in On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other
Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 42.
64. Wendell, 15.
65. For an important consideration of Sojourner Truth’s speech and her “rhetoric of ability”
here, while she was disabled due to an injury to her hand during her enslavement, see Mere-
dith Minister, “Religion and (Dis)ability in Early Feminism,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Reli-
gion 29.2 (2013) 5–24.
66. For more on the construction of female and male embodiment and experience of
embodiment see Denise Riley, Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in His-
tory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). For a consideration of the difference
in female embodiment from the perspective of body theology, see Paul Reid-Bowen, “Why
Women Need to be Ripped, Shredded and Sliced: Political, Philosophical and Theological
Reflections,” in Controversies in Body Theology, ed. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood
(London: SCM Press, 2008), 207–226.
67. Freeman, “A Feminist Theology of Disability,” 84.
68. Among them are the following: (1) Not everyone has a good experience with his/her
mother. (2) Sentimental rhetoric around women’s mysterious and tender nature, establishes
the idea that to be a true and fulfilled woman one must have children. (3) The way mother-
hood is described promotes pathological self-sacrificing. (4) For women without children it
suggests they haven’t measured up. And (5) lifting motherhood to the exclusion of other
vocations, circumscribes the range of life experience. Elizabeth Johnson Quest for the Living
God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God (New York: Continuum, 2008), 100.
€ ssler Fiorenza, “G*d—the Many-Named: Without Place and Proper Name,”
69. Elisabeth Schu
in Transcendence and Beyond, eds. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Uni-
versity of Indiana Press, 2007), 109–26.

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THE INFERTILE WOMB OF GOD

70. In her 2010 essay she writes: “[W]e are called forth from the womb waters.” Catherine
Keller, “Tangles of Unknowing: Cosmology, Christianity and Climate” in Through Us, With Us,
In Us: Relational Theologies in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Lisa Isherwood and Elaine Bellcham-
bers. (London: SCM Press, 2010).
71. Catherine Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Unsaying of Feminist Theology,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 4 (December 2008): 905–933. And also Cath-
erine Keller, “‘And Truth—So Manifold!’—Transfeminist Entanglements,” Feminist Theology 22,
no. 1 (2013): 77–87.
72. Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender,” 927.
73. Sharon Betcher, “Becoming Flesh of My Flesh: Feminist and Disability Theologies on the
Edge of Posthuman Discourse” as part of a roundtable honoring the work of Nancy Eiesland,
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26, no. 2 (2010): 107–139, quotation on 115.
74. Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
75. Ibid.,151.
76. Sallie McFague, “The World as God’s Body,” in Concilium: The Body and Religion eds. Regina
Ammicht-Quinn and Elsa Tamez (London: SCM Press, 2002/2), 50–56.
77. Karen Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective (St. Louis,
Chalice Press, 2006), 58.
78. Ibid., 71–72.
79. Eiesland, The Disabled God, 103.
80. Lisa Isherwood, “Indecent Theology: What F-ing Difference Does it Make?” in Dancing
Theology in Fetish Boots eds. Lisa Isherwood and Mark D. Jordan (London, SCM Press, 2010),
68–78, quotation on 68.
81. Donald E. Hall Queer Theories (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 15.
82. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: NYU Press,
2006), 2.
83. Marcella Althaus-Reid, “Indecent Exposures: Excessive Sex and the Crisis of Theological
Representation” in The Good News of the Body: Sexual Theology and Feminism, ed. Lisa Isherwood
(NYC: NYU Press, 201), 205–222, quotation on 213.
84. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, “Thinking Theology and Queer Theory,” Femi-
nist Theology 15, no. 3 (2007): 302–314, quotation on 304.
85. Marcella Althaues-Reid “From Goddess to Queer Theology: The State we are in now,”
Feminist Theology 13, no. 2 (2005): 265–272, quotation on 271.
86. Marcella Althaus-Reid and Lisa Isherwood, “Thinking Theology and Queer Theory,” 307.
87. Ibid., 308.
88. One might consider this confusion of sexed nouns like mother and father with other
gendered pronouns to suggest intersexed or transgendered language for God.
89. Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 6.

138 . CROSSCURRENTS
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