The body as symbol: Bringing together theories of sex/gender and race for theological discourse

This dissertation focuses on race and sex/gender as critical theological topics that are not being adequately addressed in most theological discourse. They are either deemed irrelevant to mainstream theology and addressed in a theoretically unsophisticated manner, if at all, or compartmentalized in theological specializations leaving them outside mainstream theological discourse and separate from each other. Sex/gender and race are important topics for several reasons. First, much suffering has resulted from the meanings human beings have assigned to various articulations of sex/gender and race and the actions taken and institutions established based on these meanings. Second, reflection on race and sex/gender leads to conversation about the reality and meaning of the body, and the body is a crucial theological topic. Third, the most central questions in theology lead us to the body and discussion of the body leads us to the most fundamental questions of theology.;I argue that theology needs to create common approaches for reflection on the body that consider the whole body. My project presents a tool to establish better theological discourse about the body that takes these specificities into consideration and brings them together in theological anthropology. I first explore theological discourses concerning race and sex/gender in order to plot a landscape of and for these conversations. This landscape exposes the complexity of these topics and reveals that within each conversation there is great disparity about how to talk about race and sex/gender. This first step of the project can help theologians articulate and map their own theories of sex/gender and race and promote more sophisticated conversation about the body within the discipline of theology. This part of the dissertation also illustrates the centrality of the questions of sex/gender and race for theology. In the second part of this dissertation, I explore womanist theology to gain insights for bringing race and sex/gender together in theological discourse. Building on these insights, my proposal of the body as symbol argues that a full appreciation of the body in its specificity and complexity must address the body as construction and the body as expression.