Kampen om gudinnan. Lina Guptas hinduiska feministteologi

Abstract

feminist theology by exploring her employment of seven interpretative strategies for stripping Hinduism of its patriarchal clothing. Women's experience and praxis serve as starting points, and norms of evaluation for her theologising. In the section on Gupta's employment of the strategy of selection, I argue that one of her priorities is to make visible and to extricate patriarchal interpretations from previous understandings of Kali. She successively unravels the "phantasms" of misogyny, androcentrism and hierarchisation in texts, myths and conceptions of the goddess, of femininity, and of normative womanhood. A hermenutics of suspicion thus helps Gupta to identify interpretations ofthe goddess that devaluefemininity and urge for the control of the goddess/femininity by a male god or a male principle. The strategy of consent is also foundational for Lina Gupta's Kali theology. She consents to images and understandings of Kali that are freed from patriarchal trappings, in line with the assumed egalitarian core of Hinduism and to the benefit of women. A holistic understanding of Kali is still another of Gupta's interpretative strategies. The goddess is identified with the ultimate principle, she is transcendent and immanent and she encompasses femininity and masculinity. Thus she is not subordinated to a male god or a male principle. Liberation is a sixth hermenutical key. For Gupta, Kali represents a way of facing and transcending any limitation, be it spiritual or mundane, self-created or imposed by others. A radical re-imagining of gender has been recognised as still another interpretative strategy. By understanding masculinity/femininity as human essences inherent in every individual, Gupta distances herself from the established Sanskritic gender order that links the essences of masculinity and femininity to biological sex and maintains the necessity of strictly gendered social roles. By combining an essentialistic and a constructivist approach concerning gender, Gupta's Kali theology represents what I have called a humanistic gender order that stresses the equality between women and men at symbolic/ideological, social and psychological levels.