The Ethics of Gender: New Dimensions to Religious Ethics

Susan Parson′s new book explores a dimension of human life that has proven to be troublesome in understanding ourselves and disturbing in social relationships and structures. That dimension is gender. The Ethics of Gender investigates the impact of thinking with gender on modern ethics, and considers the insights that postmodern gender theory might bring to the ethical project. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick′s suggestion of the discursive incoherence of gender, the author follows the fault lines of modern humanism that are opened up by the gender critique, in relation to embodiment, subjectivity, and agency. The book investigates the effort to sustain humanism by means of an ethics of difference, of relationality, and of revaluation of nature, in such writers as Martha Nussbaum, Daphne Hampson, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Grace Jantzen, and Luce Irigaray. The central thrust of the book is, however, to understand these as echoes of the Nietzschean cry for redemption, and thus as signs of the failure of post–Enlightenment ethical thinking. With the help of Judith Butler′s analyses of coming to matter, of subjection, and of performativity, the book concludes with the possibility of another way of self–understanding and of renewal in theological ethics for our time.

Preface.

Introduction.

1. On Ethics and Gender.

2. Feminism as an Ethics of Gender.

3. Is Ethics a Man′s Subject?.

4. The Matter of Bodies.

5. The Subject of Language.

6. The Power of Agency.

7. Engendering Ethics.

8. Conceiving of Difference.

9. Subjected in Hope.

10. For Love of God.

Select Bibliography.

Index.

Susan Frank Parsons is the Director of Pastoral Studies at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge, UK. She has published many articles and a book entitled Feminism and Christian Ethics (CUP, 1996), which has been widely cited and appreciatively reviewed.

"This is a demanding but rewarding book. Dr. Parsons wants to reconstrue theological ethics by developing our critical sensitivity to the ways we are made by our cultures. That human beings are richly complex and positively creative is a key feature of what she has to say about ′gender′. This profoundly theological book centres on the virtue of hope and the transfiguration of human relationships. No crying for the moon here, but something which is a serious possibility." Ann Loades, University of Durham, UK

"This work is a fine achievement. There is an impressive range of treatments, remarkable erudition, consistent clarity, and imaginative glimpses of a new future for recognizably Christian ethics. It is certain to be discussed for several years." Theology