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regulation (Wainwright 1995); and (5) the attempt to show that direct intimacy with, or
“perception” of, the divine is a defensible epistemological possibility (contra Kant), and
that appeals to the narratives of female mystics (especially Teresa of Avila) can provide
significant support for such a position (Alston 1991).
We have already seen how Anderson attacks such epistemological developments as these
as signs of a fatal circularity in the guild's thinking, and of its unhealthy obsession with
evidences; and how Jantzen is even more dismissive of naïve feminist appeals to
experience. But my own reading of these highly sophisticated developments in analytic
philosophy of religion is a different one. I want to argue, contrariwise, that once some
gender sensibility is developed theoretically, this explosion of interest and creativity in
recent analytic philosophy of religion in religious epistemology is actually already a sign
of the discourse covertly “feminizing” itself.^24 By this I mean that we see philosophers of
religion already turning away here, in their different ways, from classic Enlightenment
epistemological concerns with foundationalism, public evidentialism, and
universalizability, and making appeals instead to the more subtle and contestable
categories of experience, trust, affectivity, subjectivity, interiority, and mystical theology.
Such categories are often, either implicitly or explicitly, founded in women's narratives of
transformation; but even if they are not, they bear much of the freight of stereotypical
femininity. Put thus, we may suggest that these developments constitute not only a
“postmodern” disposition, but more pointedly, a sign of the male philosopher of religion
now attempting to “tak[e] her light to illuminate his path,” as Irigaray has charged.
But are these developments then necessarily negative? Must we dismiss them as another
suspicious assimilation by the male philosopher of the occluded power of the feminine?^25
Is this just one more way in which male philosophy obliterates the feminist voice by
stealing and controlling the insights of women? Much will depend here on our
fundamental gender-theoretical perspective; if we presume a fixed, Lacanian binary
(which I have progressively critiqued in this chapter), we may remain deeply pessimistic
about the sublation of it. But if we have a more fluid and negotiable view of gender, then
the way the argument proceeds in each philosophical case, and how much consciousness
is evidenced of an implicit gender subtext in the discussion, will become crucial. Even
then, there is a great difference between welcoming, and even pedestalizing, the power of
femininity to transform the male psyche or religious dilemma (a recurrent theme in
Romanticism), and allowing the woman to speak for herself and enunciate her particular
concerns and interests. As we have demonstrated above, the subtext of gender often laps
at the edges of the philosophical argument in the form of tellingly sexist examples that
include women in subordinate or stereotypical roles. But once this is demonstrated, it is at
least possible, I submit, to imagine a transformed discourse in which these dangers could
be consciously named and averted. The problem of gender denial remains a deep one, but
the strategy of demonstrating lively current
end p.518