Toward a Theological Anthropology of Resistance: Korean American Women's Ambivalent Subjectivity, 'Third Space' and Religious Education

This study focuses on women's ambivalent subjectivity and challenges religious educators to complicate and expand their understanding of resistance as a goal and method of liberative religious education. Elaborating on the concept of Third Space, the dissertation conceptualizes resistance as a creative holding of tensions in the space between persons' subjective worlds and objective realities, and between historicity and transcendence. The goal of this project is to build conceptual grounds for a theological anthropology of third space based on eleven Korean American women's narratives of subordination and resistance, in dialogue with sources in pedagogy, theology, and psychology. Toward that end, the dissertation explores and evaluates concepts and images of third space in poststructuralist and postcolonial critical pedagogies; feminist and womanist theologies; the psychological theories of Donald W. Winnicott, Jessica Benjamin, and Robert Kegan; and the theological anthropology of Karl Rahner. Employing the method of critical appropriation and mutually critical conversation, the study makes room for the paradoxical, lived experience of women who navigate oppressive systems and transcend the false binary of freedom/autonomy and complicity/subordination in their relationships with other people and with God.;Chapter 1 analyzes the narratives and reveals the women's ambivalent subjectivity. The dissertation continues with an introduction to and evaluation of poststructuralist and postcolonial pedagogies. Special attention is given to the concept of third space that is described and implied in these theories. With the women's narratives and pedagogical theories in the background, the dissertation excavates what I call "Feminist Valorization of Women's Resistance" and feminist and womanist theologies of sin. Psychological theories follow, drawing especially on the theories of Winnicott, Benjamin, and Kegan. The last two chapters take a turn to the theological, first locating a connection between the idea of third space and Rahner's theological anthropology, and then pointing toward a theological anthropology of third space. This anthropology includes expanded concepts and images of resistance, and proposals for reshaping liberative religious education. As a whole, the project contributes to the studies on Korean American women, feminist theology, Rahnerian theology, and religious education.