Recognizing Other Subjects in Feminist Pastoral Theology

Abstract

My project examines the construction of the feminist pastoral subject. Moving between theory and practice, I reflect on data I gathered by interviewing hospital chaplains on best practices of gender specific pastoral care and review literature on feminist pastoral theology, care, and counseling to understand the subject. The dissertation is guided by a critical correlative method that prompts three overarching questions. First, what is the state of subjectivity in feminist pastoral theology? Second, what resources in philosophy and psychology deepen our theories of subjectivity, suffering, care, and justice? Third, what does feminist pastoral theology have to say in response? I discovered that feminist pastoral theology describes its subjects through a lens of gender difference but does not adequately account for the psycho-social process of recognition-assertion. Drawing on psychological and social theories of recognition attentive to gender injustices, I develop a feminist pastoral theology of recognition and praxis of encounter.