The third critical issue that arises with Anderson's standpoint epistemology is a pragmatic
one of how to convert the luminaries of analytic philosophy of religion to a perspective
cognizant of female desire. If this is now more a matter of ethical commitment than the
embracing of a mysterious feminist blik, then the burden rests on Anderson to convince
her readership, first, that the writings of analytic philosophy of religion have indeed been
the products of repressed female desire, and second, that there is a creative, indeed
virtuous, way forward in terms of a renegotiated standpoint. My hesitations about the
success of Anderson's existing strategies in this third area have already been voiced: not
only is it lamentably easy for the analytic philosopher of religion to express blanket
denial of collusion in sexism (perhaps especially once his pronouns have been tidied up!),
but the loose sort of appeal that Anderson makes to myth and mimesis in the area of
desire is arguably too far removed from the existing discourses of analytic philosophy of
religion to attract attention, regrettable as this may be.
What, then, are the alternatives? After this exacting analysis and critique of Jantzen's and
Anderson's projects, it is time to sketch some of my own proposals in closing. At the
same time I shall gather up a number of the loose ends and questions that I have left
along the way.
Feminism and Analytic Philosophy of Religion: Prospects for
Rapprochement?
To ask whether there are prospects of rapprochement between analytic philosophy of
religion and feminist theory and philosophy is of course in one sense to beg the whole
question with which this chapter has been concerned. The more one's commitments in
feminist theory veer toward the post-Lacanian end of the spectrum (in which male
phallocentrism is deemed a deep and irremovable feature of Western intellectual life), the
less will one be inclined to seek out opportunities for such rapprochement or expect the
prospects to be fruitful for women—whether spiritually or professionally. Because my
critique of the epistemological sectarianism of this particular school of feminist theory
will by now be evident, however, what is offered in this last section is a discernibly
different feminist strategy. It relies neither on the apparently immovable gender binaries
of French psycholinguistic feminist theory (for, contra Jantzen, I urge a more fluid
understanding of the negotiations of gender),^19 nor does it appeal to the brand of feminist
standpoint epistemology that presumes an inexorable distancing of the knower from the
known (for, contra Anderson, feminist epistemology may arguably afford claims to
intensified intimacy with the known, rather than the opposite).^20 However, with Jantzen
and Anderson, I take it as read that feminist critiques of analytic philosophy of religion
have, at the very least, established the existence of a suspicious gender “subtext” in much
writing in the discipline: the making of “God” in the image of the autonomous,
Enlightenment “generic male,” and, as I have argued elsewhere,^21 the positing of an
unconditioned “incompatibilistic” view of freedom as a supposedly necessary adjunct to
the solution of the problem of evil are just two signs of the inherent elevation of a certain
form of masculinism over the concerns of relationship, closeness, desire, or dependence,
which have rightly exercised feminist theorists and ethicists. Yet it would, I believe, be a