Making Faith See: Feminist & Womanist Visions That Make Visible What Challenges The Church
Churches today cannot engage with pain or complexity easily. Not really, if they do, it usually centers around trying to find a solution. The problem with that, is it typically involves the church taking on a moral high ground, centering themselves, and not taking into consideration the social realities at play that affect humans differently based on race, class, gender, and sexuality.
In this rendering of the church, I specifically call out the dominant, mainstream churches impacted by connections to conservative evangelicalism. These include churches that are complicit in the Christian Right and moderate, even progressive churches whose ideology gets shaped by the Christian voices dominating the airwaves.Conservative evangelical church streams center on whiteness, are patriarchal and take a literalist interpretation of Scripture. Now, there is a lot more to it than that, but what can get underscored is that women, people of color, queer folks, and those who are disabled or refugees are marginalized to varying degrees within the community.
One of the harms to arise is Purity Culture. A way of thinking that pushes conformity, assimilation, and violence onto bodies, telling them they have to inhabit specific roles of existence in community life. These roles get defined as “normative,” and they prioritize heteronormativity, the purity of white womanhood, and the position of the patriarchal man of the house. Churches hammer these roles into congregants early, and even “progressive” churches deal with that damage.
This grounding serves to introduce the work of Susan Mieselas. A photographer who focuses on unveiling that which gets hidden, crafting space for the subject to tell their story. Her collection Carnival Strippers and A Room Of Their Own inspired my analysis. I want to shake up the church, hold the church accountable, and reimagine what church spaces can be. That means grappling with what the church likes to hide and experiences it does not wish to see, and if it does see, then it runs the risk of claiming stories that are not their own.
Sex workers and domestic abuse survivors exist in these margins. They get hidden by the church, and because of stereotypes and narratives, they get cast as either deserving of their realities, unintelligent, not respecting themselves, etc. These are tropes I have heard come from the mouths of church leaders.
Within the theological field, there are theologians and ethicists of feminist, womanist, queer, and liberationist perspectives who provide social analysis and response to these lived experiences. Rather than turn away, they center the lived experiences of those most needing to be heard. Dr. Emilie Townes, a womanist ethicist, wrote Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, where she deals with tropes and perceptions of Black womanhood that have been deeply damaging. Townes brings in a new approach, and she works to recover the truth. Her framework applies to the work of Mieselas in that here resides a bridge to connect theology and the arts. It means an examination of the social realities the church needs to face. Combining Townes and Meiselas opens a point of entry where faith communities can step in and witness.
There is a soup all humans swim in, the “Fantastic Hegemonic Imagination.” The stereotypes, the systems of oppression, and the mindsets used to otherize are bound in all people (cite Townes). It creates oppressive conditions and brutality like enslavement, genocide, war, attacks on bodily autonomy, anti-LGBTQ+ hate, and climate destruction. Due to factors like race, gender, sex, and class, it affects people differently.
That imagination is what Townes is confronting, and she chooses the term countermemory to enact a form of resistance. This countermemory manifests in the photographs of Mieselas. As Townes communicates:
Countermemory is that which seeks to disrupt ignorance and invisibility… Countermemory begins with the particular to move into the universal and it looks to the past for microhistories to force a reconsideration of flawed (incomplete or vastly circumscribed) histories. This focus on localized experiences of oppression in countermemory allows us to refocus dominant narratives touting narrow lenses into a reframing of what constitutes the universal. (Townes 22-23)
Moving into the images in A Room of Their Own and Carnival Strippers, I ask that we think of what is getting unveiled. Whose perspectives are we seeing? What have we not considered when it comes to broaching these topics? If we are to have serious conversations about safe, consensual sex work or protecting domestic abuse survivors, then we must consider the social realities that affect agency and advocacy.
Centering the subjects in her photos, Mieselas opens up a different point of view that dismantles dominantly held tropes of sex work or abuse. She reveals a hidden history, the countermemories, peeling back the curtain and opening up a space of witnessing. Through this analysis, I want to ask the church to act as a witness. There may be no easy answer for how churches can move in all of this, but it must begin with meeting these women where they are and letting them speak. It is what makes feminist analysis valuable when it takes into consideration the lenses missing. This work is nowhere near complete, and there are gaps, but with those gaps, there is the potential for expansion.
A Room Of Their Own
Tina Campt, a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, introduces the terminology of frequency as the impression art leaves on the spectator (cite). It is not on the what but the how one sees (cite). It calls us to think about how images affect our world understanding. Simple photos can reveal a context we may have been unaware of. That frequency unveils Townes’ understanding of countermemory brought forth by Mieselas. We are not focusing solely on the what but the how of the photos.
In the project, A Room Of Their Own, Mieselas traveled to women's refuge centers in the Black Country of England to do a project with women in the transitory period of escaping abuse and beginning the possibility of independence. In the photos, stories are revealed and ripped away at the stereotypes used to describe domestic abuse survivors. For example, think of the tropes where people say the woman deserved what happened to her, she should have known better, and she could have left.
One of these women, Sam, had escaped an abusive family, and she had experienced repeated sexual abuse from a cousin. (cite) She shared bits of her story with Meiselas that I highlight below:
“I just wanted to be me” (86)
“At home I had 200-300 pairs of shoes but my parents never let me wear them. I used to buy them, they used to say you’re dressing like a slag, like a prostitute.” (87)
“Nothing was the same. They made me quit my job. My dad and brothers weren’t talking to me, as I couldn’t tell them I got raped and drugged - who would believe me.” (90)
“After that my family took me to Pakistan to get married to a guy who was 16 years old. It didn’t make sense. I refused to marry him. My mom became ill. My dad blamed me. I blamed me. I began to self harm. I wanted to hurt.” (90)
“My dad is back in the days when girls should be seen and not heard. At the age of 21, I could see he was hitting my mum, I’m not stupid. It’s behind closed doors. I’m the only one who knows it’s a fake life we are living.” (91)
The countermemory Townes introduces applies to Sam’s story. The photos Mieselas takes never reveal the face of Sam but capture the interests and the stories she carries. The wall of shoes, what may seem like a simple collection, connects to something more. Sam's crossed arms reveal a guardedness as her story is one others did not know about. Recovering her story and sharing it expands the larger discourse surrounding domestic violence.
The “fake life” of her family and the constant blame felt needed to get placed in conversation with how domestic abuse has typically gotten hidden in communities. Due to the sexual abuse she suffered from, Sam was forced into a silent position. It reveals how rare safe places are when one is trapped. Asking the question of why a survivor does not leave does not take into consideration the factors that impacted Sam. Agency is limited, even within the refuge. Sam remains anonymous in many ways, and all she owned in her former life is lost, and she must rebuild.
Following the work of Campt, how are churches and faith communities implicated, and how are they complicit? (Verse 3 104) Are we rethinking agency and listening to these stories? Sam exists in a liminal space, complicating any narrative that tries to simplify her story. It is painful and not easy to listen or witness to, but that is what the church must do. Focusing on patronizing saviorism does not deal with what Sam and other women carry.
Mieselas is beginning a small act of repair, an encounter different from what Sam experienced. Instead of being forced to do things and suffering in silence, Mieselas opens up space for dialogue. Sam can speak, reveal as much as she wishes, and still have distance from the spectators who encounter her story. Is this not what the church should be doing? We are to act as witnesses, as companions on a complex journey that does not shame or judge those trying to survive.
Emilie Townes states, “For me, life and wholeness (the dismantling of evil/the search for and celebration of freedom) is found in our interactions with our communities and social worlds, peoples, and life beyond our immediate terrains (6).” Mieselas reaches beyond and uses the abilities at her disposal to create a window that brings into focus that others would rather not see. This reparative complexity is underscored increasingly by Mieselas through Carnival Strippers.