ALIEN SHE: I’m loving Fragmentation and Redemption, but the first essay does have one premise I’d like to challenge a bit. Bynum writes, “If one looks with women rather than at women, women’s lives are not liminal to women–but neither, except in a very partial way, are male roles or male experiences.”

That might be entirely true of the medieval women’s narratives she’s discussing. I certainly don’t know enough to challenge her there! But she does seem to be implying that it’s true per se–women aren’t liminal to women because we are women–and that I think is false.

One of the facts of women’s lives in what you can call patriarchy (although I think that term’s focus on fatherhood is misleading, both because women-as-mothers do an immense amount to shape and transmit culture and because you can have male domination of culture despite a severe diminution of fathers’ status and presence–anyway, let’s move on) is that women are alien to ourselves and “other” to ourselves.

There are obvious disadvantages to this fact of emotions. There are perhaps less-obvious spiritual advantages. Self-alienation can be a strong source of insight, self-questioning, and Christian submission. (This possibility is really important w/r/t Bynum’s essay, because she’s arguing that medieval women’s religious narratives generally rested on continuity of identity rather than radical conversion of identity: Because they already identified with Christ-the-suffering or Christ-the-lowly, they could imitate Him without a radical transformation or “reversal” of identity.)

My own perspective on this stuff is really weird because of being lesbian–I talked about gay alienation as a precursor to Catholic conversion here and here, and alluded to it here. I don’t know to what extent my personal focus on the benefits rather than the (real, obvious, and painful) drawbacks of self-alienation and viewing women as Other are related to my sexual orientation, and I’d be interested in any comments you all have there. But on the more basic point about women’s self-alienation (and therefore, although I know these aren’t synonymous terms, self-liminality), I’ve heard lots of straight women support my position.

Where this goes, I don’t know. It does, at least, complicate Bynum’s final call to “stand with” women when doing history; how do you “stand with” someone who doesn’t entirely stand with herself? (Should we seek to “stand with” ourselves?)