downplay

In the discussion of the problems of gendered rhetoric in the Church, I usually try to keep the level of discourse as rational as possible. I talk about constructs of gender. I talk about rhetoric and reality. I talk about language, the significance of its intent, its significance without regard to intent. I talk about cultural discourse and pre-conscious assumptions. I talk about authority and covert oppression, the structures of discrimination.

What I don't talk about if I can help it is how it feels, because I've found that if, in an argument with anyone disinclined toward my point of view, I let on that there is an emotional component to the conversation and its subject, my adversary pounces. If I have feelings, then I must be approaching this irrationally; I must be misinterpreting, in my overemotional state. It can't be that there is misogyny endemic in the Church or that the cultural misogyny matters; it's that I am personally hurt and reacting only to specific, not institutional, abuses. I become pathologized instead of heard, diagnosed instead of addressed.

But I've been struggling for years to come to terms with the teachings of the Church to which I have committed myself on the one hand and what I embrace idealogically on the other: that women are people too, that we are not to be subjugated, owned, possessed, given, had, used, caged, commodified, objectified. And the struggle hurts. It hurts to go to a community for the worship of one's God, and find that one is not entirely a person there; it hurts to find it posited in all the scriptural texts available that women are secondary to men, either too sinful or too special to be engaged in the unmarked flow of public life. It hurts to feel that most of the people in the Church, the ecclesiasty not excepted, do not really want me here; that everyone would be kind of relieved if I'd just apostatize already.

For Mormon feminists, it's our very beings that are at stake. Are we people, in the full, enfranchised, agentive sense of the word, or are we less than that? Does God pat us on the head and squish us back into our gender role, hand us off to the stewardship of some husband-slash-possessor, or does he engage us as individuals, children, the souls of willing subjects? While the logical problems abound and the hermeneutics of rhetoric demand a careful dissection, while there is plenty both rational and irrational to keep the bloggernacle powered and lively, still, both before the reason and after it, my hope and faith are being quietly shredded. My belief in God's love staggers when I am called a possession; it buckles when the person calling me that is the prophet. Every time I think I've gotten to a place I can breathe, believe, and move forward, something else smacks me down. Every time I think I have achieved a balance I can manage, between my faith in the Church and my feminism, another hurdle is dropped in my way.

The stakes in this are as specific as they are general; it is not only the cultural place of women that means and matters, but my own place in the Church, my own relationship to God, and my own interior wholeness. Of course, none of this needs to enter the general discussion; that discussion should be logical and general and reason-based, or else its ends can never be general enough to accomplish what needs accomplishing. But I wish the division didn't have to be so absolute. I wish the cultural damage and the personal agony could both be part of the argument.

I am tired. I feel like God is not listening today, any more than the Church is listening. I envision myself far away from all aspects of the conversation, in a quiet, sunny, empty place, one without words or truths or fears. I don't feel like walking away just yet, and I don't want to feel like walking away, but today, I wish I could want to feel like walking away. Here it is cold and loud and louder in my own head than anywhere. And none of the voices there is God's.

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