| This dissertation explores how womanist theology as course content can help students use their culturally-bound rhetorical skills and strategies to communicate with and critique both the academy and their own communities or cultures. Borrowing from Alice Walker's “womanism,” which offers an alternative to black nationalism, mainstream feminism, and black feminism, black female theologians formed womanist theology as a way of reading their experiences into all facets of Christian theology, in particular the Bible and the traditional black church. Fashioning a critique with the rhetorical knowledge and cultural capital it appropriates and generates—sermons, political essays, novels, spiritual autobiographies—womanist theology can offer students rhetorical language and methodology for identifying and resisting the unjust ideas and practices they encounter in the academy, their communities, and the world. For example, womanist theology privileges the biblical story of Hagar, an Egyptian slave who heeds the word of God in the midst of sexual and maternal surrogacy and survives in the wilderness. Womanist theology seeks to disrupt and dismantle patriarchal hierarchies within both the traditional church and the greater society in order to transform the sacred and secular worlds into more efficacious spheres.; Womanist theology in this dissertation is connected with progressive Christian theologies and postmodern theories such as social constructionism, postcolonial theory, discourse community theory, and, in particular, critical race theory (CRT). Formulated by legal scholars of color such as Patricia Williams and Derek Bell, CRT regards racism within the law and the greater society as social constructions that can be interrogated and dismantled. Work in CRT supports the idea within womanist theology that societal oppressions involve complex, social, and contingent forces that can be deconstructed through critical analysis and transformed through social action. In the classroom, womanist theology and the culturally-bound critical and creative texts that it creates and engenders can help create for developmental writing students a bridge between the language and culture they possess and that of the academy, while making them more critical of and active within both spheres. |
