Sacred Pronouns
by Judith Plaskow
http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010plaskowThe issue of the role of male God-language in producing and maintaining a male-dominated Judaism was first raised by feminists over thirty-five years ago. From the early 1970s, when Rita Gross argued that Jewish inability to say "God-She" was the ultimate symbol of women's degradation, through the 1980s and 1990s, feminists both insisted on the importance of female language and wrote poetry and created new liturgies that expressed their visions of who "God-She" might be. Today, except for a few brave voices speaking of a Jewish Goddess, the issue seems to have fizzled, and no new language has emerged for over a decade. Why?
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Secondly, early feminist liturgical creativity took for granted the gender binary and was sometimes essentialist -- characteristics that have been rendered embarrassing by queer theory's insistence that gender is unstable, malleable, and performative. How can one talk about female images of God without presupposing that there is femaleness and without reinforcing traditional female stereotypes? Doesn't the insistence that God is both male and female represent the ultimate reification of gender dualism?
