ABSTRACT
In contrast to Chapter 3, which discussed how smashing of idols of the feminine could prove merely self-destructive, this final chapter examines some of the positive consequences of feminist idoloclasm. Here, the breaking of idols released energy and colour into women’s lives. It was not so much a dramatic gesture of private self-actualization as the liberation of a three-dimensional selfhood whose becoming could be spoken, heard, and learned in new, more festive biophilic relations to other women and the environment. The chapter draws the book to a close by using Mary Daly and Luce Irigaray’s notion of ‘becoming divine’ to summarize the feminist liberative project. ‘Becoming divine’ would enable any woman, religious or otherwise, to become the original of herself: a person who is ‘divine’ because she is not a knowable or reproducible thing but a self-possessed subject whose relationships with other subjects allow her to be that which she has it in her to become.
