| abstract |
This dissertation explores an alternative way of claiming social identities beyond the somewhat polarized trajectories in feminist theology involved in essentialized concepts of identity and a postmodern "politics of difference." Such an alternative evolves to become a post-oppositional theology that seeks to make entanglement, multiplicity, and complexity visible8212;namely, entanglement of relations in the construction of identities, multiplicity of self in relation to social locations and the complexity of the social, cultural, and economic effects of different levels of oppression caused by different social boundaries. In doing so, a post-oppositional theology helps to broaden the understanding of how theological imagination intersects with complexity in politics and ethics.
Karen Barad's agential realism provides theoretical and methodological provocations generating a post-oppositional theology. An ontology of agential relation demands an understanding of identity as material-discursive practices that emerge through "intra-action." Engaging with an agential realistic perspective, races and genders as social and visible identities are viewed as "explanatory," and not merely as descriptive. As a radically relational ontology of agential realism calls for the intimacy of being and doing, the ethicality becomes an imperative subject for a post-oppositional theology. Through a comparative turn to Zhuangzian paradox, ethicality promotes a praxis of "responding but not storing" (ying er bu cang應而不藏). The Zhuangzian notion of "forgetting self" (wangji忘己) is proposed as an intra-active self, increasing the capacity for an ethical praxis for the sake of social justice.
The resulting post-oppositional theology envisions a theopolitics of intra-carnation that seeks an "intra-capable" coalition. Hearing is proposed as that which enables intra-capable coalitions to be enfleshed by "wit(h)nessing" how different oppressive apparatuses intra-act to produce everyday experiences; how different apparatuses in power relations enact shared histories from groups of shared location; and how a shared apparatus of histories and cultures impacts the ways to live, experience, and struggle. Hearing also manifests a divine way of intra-acting responsibly with love. From the divine invitation into deep hearing, a theopolitics of intra-carnation discovers hope of oneness-in-Christ, based on Gal. 3:28 for intra-capable coalitions.
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