ABSTRACT
This passage was valuable because it located a source of oppression in women's lives at the very disjunction we were struggling to sustain. Moraga's analysis modeled a way to move beyond sorting women's experience into binary oppositions of soul and body, spiritual and sexual desire, religious life and erotic life. Her work·modeled ways of moving beyond other false dichotomies as well. For example, her analysis of women's "hungers" and the ways in which religious authority systems shape their responses to those hungers illuminates the connections and tensions often obscured by conventional distinctions between the "public" and "private." Furthermore, when she speaks of religious authority systems she holds in the same line of sight material and spiritual needs, indigenous and colonial religions, and Third World and Western patriarchies. Finally, when she looks at patriarchal religion in the West, she refuses to take at face value its traditional opposition of body and so~l. Instead she raises questions about something those distinctions obscure: the role played by women's bodies in patriarchal concepts of spirituality.
