(W)riting like a Woman: In Search of a Feminist Theological Poetics

In what follows, I want to tell something of how poetry and faith have been significant in my life and how I perceive their interrelationship. Underlying this story is a sense that both poetry and theology have funded and nourished my sense of self from earliest days – taught me who I am, where I belong in the world and how to speak into and of the world. At the same time, poetry and theology have been arenas in which I’ve struggled to come to authentic speech as a woman – a pervasive theme in much second-wave feminist writing from the 1960s onwards, where there has been considerable debate about what it means to write, think and speak (even throw and climb!) ‘as’ or ‘like a woman’. ¹ The debate has centred around women’s struggles to find an authentic female tradition or traditions of writing, to take up a subject position (rather than be the object of the male gaze or male writing) and to develop distinctively feminine forms of literature without buying into limited, essentialist notions of gender. My own struggle has been to find traditions of theology and poetry into which my own particular voice can speak and to find a way of integrating poetic and theological discourse, without prioritising one over the other or re-inscribing oppressive dualisms – emotion versus intellect, concretion versus abstraction, feminine versus masculine – onto the poetry/theology relation. 10In this piece, I seek to write in a way that is confessional and reflexive, as well as thematic, as a way of honouring this struggle and attempting to hold the tension between different modes of thinking and speaking. My aim is to stay close to my experience of both reading and writing poetry, as well as to draw on my commitment to prayer and public liturgy, my work of teaching theology and spirituality (in which poetry has a place), and my research into women’s faith lives (which employs ethnography in ways that link with poetry), for it is out of these contexts that my own writing has been shaped and to which it seeks to speak. I shall also make some reference to the wider feminist literature that has pursued the discussion about what ‘writing like a woman’ can mean.