Love, Friendship, and Scholarship
I love to share guest posts on my substack. This new piece, “Love, Friendship, and Scholarship” comes from Dr. Susan M. Shaw who is professor at Oregon State University and co-author of Intersectional Theology.
In 1983 Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman called for friendship “as the only appropriate and understandable motive” for white feminists to engage in academic endeavor with Feminists of Color. They added: “. . . from within friendship you may be moved by friendship to undergo the very difficult task of understanding the text of our cultures by understanding our lives in communities. This learning calls for circumspection, for questioning of yourselves and your roles in your own culture . . . it demands recognition that you do not have the authority of knowledge; it requires coming to the task without ready-made theories to frame our lives.”[1]
Over the past decade, friendship has been the basis for the work Grace Ji-Sun Kim and I have done together. More than simply writing and presenting together, we’ve eaten in each other’s homes, celebrated each other’s accomplishments, texted concern over illnesses, and met each other’s families who became our Facebook friends. And we’ve laughed, lots and lots of laughter.
While we share some things—we’re both professors, Christians, and from conservative families—we’re also pretty different in ways that matter within systems of power and privilege. Grace is Korean-American, from a working poor immigrant family. She grew up in a conservative Korean Presbyterian church. She’s straight, married to a Korean-American man who is also a professor, and middle-aged. I’m white. I grew up in a working-class family in Georgia, a fundamentalist Southern Baptist. I’m also a lesbian, married to a woman who retired from customer service and sales in the business world, and a euphemistically-called “senior adult.” Grace teaches in a small, private Christian theological school. I teach for a large, land grant, public university. Grace lives in Pennsylvania. I live in Oregon.
How we became writing partners and friends is serendipitous. I was using one of Grace’s books in my feminist theologies class. A colleague in Ethnic Studies saw it and told me he’d met Grace and then asked if I’d like for him to see if we could get her to come to Oregon State to speak. I said, “Of course,” and Robert came through. Grace came out, and we just hit it off. We spent the next few years saying how we’d like to do a project together, but the time was never quite right. Then, one day, we found ourselves both looking for a new project at the same time. We came up with the idea for our first book, Intersectional Theology, and, as they say, the rest is history.
Not all writing partners have the friendship we do, but we realize that, given our differences and how those shape one another within the social sphere, we need to do more than just work together. As Lugones and Spelman pointed out all those years ago, friendship is the only thing that allows us to examine the ways our various advantages and disadvantages affect our work and our relationship. It also means we learn a lot from one another.
Grace has taught me some life-changing concepts, like han, which means the suffering that comes from unresolved injustice. That one word has explained so much about my own life to me. I think Grace has learned things about being queer from me. And we’ve both worked hard to be allies on the journey.
Now we’ve just finished the manuscript for Surviving God, a very personal book about thinking about God from the perspectives of survivors of sexual abuse. It comes out from Broadleaf Books in March 2024. I think our friendship comes through in this book, even as we deal with really difficult material. In fact, I think only as friends could we have written this book because, as a form of intersectional theology, it centers issues of power and privilege in how we understand our own and other survivors’ stories and constructions of God.
I will always be grateful to my colleague Robert for that serendipitous introduction so many years ago. Who knew so much love, affection, and scholarship would come from it!!
[1] Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice.’” Women’s Studies International Forum. 6 (1983): 573-381.
(Also read “Surviving God: Co-writing a New Book” about our forthcoming book, Survivor God)
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