Divine Objectification: The Representation of Goddesses and Women in Feminist

Spirituality
Author(s): Cynthia Eller
Source: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion , Spring, 2000, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring,
2000), pp. 23-44
Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of FSR, Inc

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25002374

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 DIVINE OBJECTIFICATION
The Representation of Goddesses and Women
in Feminist Spirituality
Cynthia Eller

Anyone who has been to a checkout line in a grocery store recently or

driven down a highway picketed with billboards can vouch for the fact that pic
tures of women, often scantily clad, are everywhere. One hardly needs to
browse an "adult" bookstore to find women's bodies on display. Since the 1970s,
feminists have worked diligently to show that such representations of women in
mainstream art, advertising, television, and films reinforce stereotypical views
and lead more or less directly to women's subordination. It is said that it is diffi
cult for observers to separate the (sexist) image promoted in such pictures from
the real women who resemble them. Traffic in representations of women, femi
nists have argued, becomes, in essence, traffic in women themselves, since "the
[woman's] body has a usefulness for others independent or regardless of its own
right to be."1 In other words, women are objectified.
This analysis has prompted interesting questions. If representations of
women are presently lending themselves so successfully to an atmosphere of
sexism and oppression, is it possible to create images of women that are nonob
jectifying? Is there a peculiarly "feminist" way to represent women, and if so,
what is it? These questions have been much debated over the past twenty-five
years without any consensus being reached. Some feminist artists and commen
tators have insisted, with Peter Gidal, that they see no possibility of using "the
image of a naked woman ... other than in an absolutely sexist and politically
repressive patriarchal way" at this time.2 Others have argued-and have at
tempted to show in their artwork-that the nonobjectifying representation of
women not only is possible but is a critical part of the feminist project.

I thank Margaret Miles, Susan Myers-Shirk, Carol P. Christ, Ann Braude, and Mary Beth Edelson
for helpful comments on this article, as well as the members of the Center for the Study of Religion
workshop at Princeton University and an anonymous reviewer for theJFSR.
1 Melody Davis, The Male Nude in Contemporary Photography (Philadelphia: Temple Univer
sity Press, 1991), 3.
2 Peter Gidal, quoted in Lynda Nead, The Female Nude (New York: Routledge, 1992), 76.

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 24 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Spiritual feminists are among those who have chosen to accept the chal
lenge of representing women in a nonobjectifying manner. Since the move
ment's inception, spiritual feminists have produced and adopted an abundance
of female images that they regard not only as nonobjectifying but also as sacred
and empowering. On the face of it, it would seem that spiritual feminist art is
about as far as one can get from patriarchal representations of women. Yet, as I
will argue, spiritual feminist art, for all its attempts at reinterpretation and inno
vation, remains tightly wedded to artistic practices that have objectified women
for several centuries now, and that have placed religious power and divine au
thority in male hands. Whether these same practices continue to work to wom
en's detriment once they have been taken over by spiritual feminists is an open
question, one that this article seeks to address.

Feminist Spirituality and Goddess Iconography

If religions can be characterized as either iconoclastic (abhorring images
of the divine) or iconophilic (relishing images of the divine), feminist spirituality
is a clear example of the latter. Spiritual feminist worship, ritual, meditation,
and magical practice are virtually always accompanied by visual images of the
divine. Even in daily life, spiritual feminists are inclined to hang their goddesses
around their necks, set them on their altars, or tack them to their walls. Statu
ettes, paintings, calendars, and jewelry abound, and many small woman-owned
and-operated businesses cater to this ongoing hunger for female symbology.
Spiritual feminists also employ other sorts of images, including nonhuman ani
mal images, trees, stars, geometric shapes, and even the occasional male image
(though these are often all or part animal), but representations of women pre
dominate. And increasingly it is not only spiritual feminists who purchase, wear,
or display this artwork; goddess symbols can now be found in nonreligious
venues and even in the mainstream culture.
The use of imagery in feminist spirituality is intimately tied to and deeply
expressive of the movement's thealogy.3 With their delight in images of the
divine, spiritual feminists are saying things they feel cannot or should not be said
with words alone.4 One of the central messages they are trying to communicate
is that there was a time on earth when people worshiped goddesses in prefer
ence to gods, when the "feminine" was held to be sacred, and when women were
accorded a greater social status than they enjoy now. As Gloria Feman Oren
stein writes, "The Goddess symbol... reminds women that our legitimate his
tory has been buried, and that through its excavation we are learning how short

3 Spiritual feminists commonly use the neologism thealogy to indicate that they are reflecting
on the divine as feminine, substituting the feminine Greek root thea for theos, which is masculine.
4 See, for example, Elinor Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbolfor Our Time (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 307.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 25
the patriarchal period in human history has been in comparison with the 30,000
or more years of matristic history in which goddess-centered cultures flourished
in central Europe, Anatolia and the Near and Middle East."5 This central nar
rative of feminist spirituality-what I call the movement's sacred history6 or,
more broadly speaking, the myth of matriarchal prehistory7-is taught largely
through images. These images include abstract designs stamped, drawn, or
carved on pottery or stone, but the most commonly displayed images (on altars
and in books and slide shows) are representations of women, especially female
statuettes dating to Paleolithic and Neolithic times.8 Spiritual feminists use such
figurines to help them and others envision what they believe were ancient, god
dess-worshiping times, and to reflect on how it feels to recognize female power
as sacred. The single most popular image is probably the so-called Venus of Wil
lendorf, a four-inch figurine discovered in Austria and dating to the Upper
Paleolithic, probably sometime between 27,000 and 21,000 B.C.E.9 Whether or
not these images actually represented goddesses to the people who created
them is anyone's guess, but this is how they are recognized and treated within
the feminist spirituality movement.'0

5 Gloria Feman Orenstein, The Reflowering of the Goddess: Contemporary Journeys and
Cycles of Empowerment (New York: Pergamon, 1990), 6.
6 Cynthia Eller, "Relativizing the Patriarchy: The Sacred History of the Feminist Spirituality
Movement," History of Religions 30, no. 3 (1991): 279-95; and Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the
Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), chap. 8.
7 Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won't Give
Women a Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
8 Carol P. Christ has argued that the use of diminutives-"figurines" and "statuettes"-in ref
erence to these artifacts "serves to trivialize them." However, they are almost all small, as Christ
herself notes. "Eliade and the New Feminist Paradigm,"Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7,
no. 2 (Fall 1991): 84. In deference to this reality, I will continue to use these terms, though it should
be noted that I intend no disrespect.
9 Hallie Iglehart Austen, The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth, and Meditations of the World's
Sacred Feminine (Berkeley, Calif.: Wingbow, 1990), 5.
10 Such figures are widely interpreted as goddesses even outside feminist spirituality. How
ever, other interpretations have been offered as well, including that they were intended to be
dolls, erotic art, amulets or other healing or protective charms, or objects for use in initiation rituals.
For discussion of ethnographically and ethnohistorically documented uses of female figures, see
Ann Cyphers Guillen, "Thematic and Contextual Analyses of Chalcatzingo Figurines," Mexicon 10
(1988): 98-102; Anna C. Roosevelt, "Interpreting Certain Female Images in Prehistoric Art," in
The Role of Gender in Precolumbian Art and Architecture, ed. Virginia E. Miller (Lanham, Md.: Uni
versity Press of America, 1988); Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, "Anthropomorphic Figurines from
Columbia: Their Magic and Art," in Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, ed. Samuel K.
Lothrop et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961); and Peter J. Ucko, Anthropomorphic
Figurines in Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete with Comparative Materialfrom the Prehistoric
Near East and Mainland Greece (London: A. Szmidla, 1968). A defense of the theory that these were
representations of a goddess can be found in the entire corpus of Marija Gimbutas: Goddesses and
Gods of Old Europe: 6500-3500 B.C. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1982); The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989); The Civilization

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 26 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

The sacred history of feminist spirituality is not confined, of course, to

the distant past; the point of "remembering" ancient goddess worship is so that
it might be created anew in the present. There is a brisk traffic in goddess re
productions within the feminist spirituality movement.1l These reproductions,
selected from a wide chronological span, are customarily limited to southern
Europe and the Near East, the geographic areas most prominent in the move
ment's sacred history.12 In addition, spiritual feminist art has reproduced these
prehistoric images through the imaginative identification of living women with
ancient goddesses. For example, in a 1985 performance titled Revelations of the
Flesh, Cheri Gaulke photographed a naked woman, smeared with clay, who
posed as the Venus of Willendorf for a piece called Susan Maberry as the Earth
Mother on the Day after the Nuclear Holocaust.13 Here there is both repetition
and reinterpretation, as a figure recognizably like the Paleolithic Venus is em
ployed to convey a contemporary ecofeminist message.
Additional goddess images are adopted into feminist spirituality from liv
ing religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Native American and Afri
can religions, as well as from cultures now dead but known to have been pa
triarchal (e.g., classical Greece, Aztec society, and medieval Nordic culture).'4
Often these goddesses are seen as "survivors" of prehistoric goddess-worshiping
cultures. For example, a seventeenth-century bronze of the Tibetan Buddhist
dakini Vajravarahi is said by Hallie Iglehart Austen to be derived-along with
the rest of Tantric Buddhism-"from Indian matristic cultures."'5 Images of

of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe, ed. Joan Marler (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,
1991); and specifically "Vulvas, Breasts, and Buttocks of the Goddess Creatress: Commentary on the
Origins of Art," in The Shape of the Past: Studies in Honor of Franklin D. Murphy, ed. Giorgio Buc
cellati and Charles Speroni (Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology and Office of the Chancellor,
University of California, 1981). The interpretation of prehistoric female figurines is discussed at
length in Eller, Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.
11 See, for example, Nancy Blair, The Great Goddess Collection catalog (North Brunswick,
N.J.: Star River Productions, 1995); Grand Adventure Catalog (Stroudsburg, Pa.: Grand Adven
ture, 1990);Jane Iris Designs catalog (Graton, Ca.: Jane Iris, 1989); Womongathering, Womonspeak
catalog 1, no. 1 (1996); Pleiades, advertisement for Goddess Jewelry Catalog, On the Issues 5, no. 4
(1996); Goddesses Unlimited, advertisement in Goddessing Regenerated 6 (1997): 35; Kate
Cartwright, "Goddess Stamps and T-Shirts," advertisement in Goddessing Regenerated 6 (1996): 6,
24; JBL Devotional Statues, advertisement in Goddessing Regenerated 6 (1997): 4; and Slitherings
Shamanic Art, advertisement in Goddessing Regenerated 6 (1997): 3.
12 A critique of the ethnocentrism of this sacred history can be found in Emily Culpepper,
"Contemporary Goddess Thealogy: A Sympathetic Critique," in Shaping New Vision: Gender and
Values in American Culture, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R.
Miles, Harvard Women's Studies in Religion Series, no. 5 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press,
1987).
13 See Gadon, plate 32.
14 The problematics of this cross-cultural borrowing are addressed in Eller, Lap of the Goddess,
67-81.
15 Austen, 124.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 27
classical Greek goddesses are less common in spiritual feminist iconography
than prehistoric or even Eastern images (although classical Greek goddess
myths have a large and enthusiastic following in feminist spirituality), but they
do surface occasionally. One particularly popular image is that of the "many
breasted Diana," from second-century C.E. Ephesus, said to represent women
and the earth and their shared ability to offer succor.16
These historical and contemporary goddess images, much like the prehis
toric images, are used as jumping-off points for the creation of new spiritual
feminist art. Names and mythological associations may be preserved, but the
goddesses are given a completely different look: they become goddesses for
today, deities that the women who create and consume them can feel themselves
to resemble. The Waitresses, a feminist performance troupe centered in Los
Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, included a piece in their repertoire
titled The Great Goddess Diana, which they performed in restaurants. Anne
Gaudlin created and modeled a costume covered with breasts, and texts were
read to restaurant customers explaining that "Diana was a goddess worshipped
thousands of years ago. Great many-breasted Mother, ruler and nourisher of the
animal kingdom, provider of sustenance, both physical and spiritual, for all crea
tures, great and small."17 The text continued on to draw an analogy between this
ancient goddess and contemporary women, who-especially as waitresses
serve in similar nurturing roles. As Gloria Feman Orenstein explains, this per
formance piece was "a critique of our society's devaluing of the Great Mother,"
performed "in the hopes of rekindling the proper relationship of love and re
spect between the nurturer and the one who is nourished."18
Such performances raise another function of goddess images, the one that
probably contributes most to enthusiasm for the iconography of feminist spiri
tuality. Goddess images give spiritual feminists what spiritual feminist and art
critic Elinor Gadon calls "a model of empowered selfhood."l9 Many such images
have an aesthetic affinity to New Age art and to the heroines of fantasy and
science-fiction comic books.20 They are used as meditative symbols, and they

16 Austen, 27. Classicist Walter Burkert gives an alternative reading of this statue: "The god
dess 'of the many breasts' is so dear to psychoanalysts as well as to modern tourists that the simple
truth, proved decades ago, can hardly prevail: the fact that these 'breasts' are not a multiplication of
female sexuality but a kind of pectoral worn by the goddess, a detail linking the statue of Ephesus to
other cult statues of Caria and its surroundings, including Cybele, Zeus of Labraunda, and even
Atargatis of Damascus." Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), 130.
17 Anne Gaudlin and Denise Yarfitz, quoted in Orenstein, 123.
18 Orenstein, 123. This image of the many-breasted Diana (or Artemis, as she is also called) was
also used in 1978 in a performance piece in New York by Louise Bourgeois, who wore a tunic cov
ered with breast images. Gadon, plate 35.
19 Gadon, 255.
20 See, for example, Diane Stein, The Women's Spirituality Book (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1989), 23,
172; Vicki Noble, Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess through Myth, Art, and Tarot (San Francisco:

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 28 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

are intended to keep before the practitioner an alternative image of herself.

In much the way that a dieter will affix pictures of skinny models to her refrig
erator to inspire herself with images of how thin she might one day appear if she
will only keep the refrigerator door shut, spiritual feminists will place goddess
images on their walls or altars to call forth a vision of themselves as powerful,
unapologetically female, and often-in significant counterpoint to my example
of the dieter-a solid fifteen to two hundred pounds heavier than the current
fashion standard for women.21
Among these images are many with dark complexions. This raises the ques
tion of the appropriateness of the predominantly white adherents of feminist
spirituality using Black, Hispanic, or Asian goddess images. Some, both within
and outside feminist spirituality, are troubled by what seems to them to be a
very familiar romantic and implicitly colonial use of nonwhites as "spiritual."
Indeed, such stereotypes are readily identifiable in spiritual feminist art and
writing.22 Most spiritual feminists, however, regard their use of nonwhite images
as a well-intentioned attempt to show the inherent beauty and power of women
from all races and thereby to underscore the shared femaleness of women
worldwide. In feminist spiritual terms, what is most important about all of the
bodies in the art of the movement is that they are female, and obviously so. With
the rarest of exceptions, the images have hips, breasts, and rounded stomachs;
when more than one figure is present, they come in a wide variety of shapes and
sizes and ages. When they are older, their breasts sag and their waistlines
thicken. When they are younger, they are frequently shown pregnant, giving
birth, or menstruating. Birth-giving is an especially common theme. Monica
Sjoo, Swedish artist and coauthor of a massive "history of the Goddess," de
picted childbirth in a painting provocatively titled God Giving Birth (1968),23
which elicited storms of protest when it was first displayed. Similarly, Meinrad
Craighead's work Garden (1980) is an icon of woman as womb, with the central
figure's outstretched arms forming fallopian tubes and her blood-red chest,
shaped like a uterus, containing an infant.24

Harper & Row, 1983); Austen, 150; and Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Grandmother of Time (San Fran
cisco: Harper & Row, 1989), 68.
21 The heft of the goddesses imaged by spiritual feminists is often commented upon by the
women who revere them and is self-consciously used to combat current pressures on women to be
thin. One set of goddess images, developed by Willow LaMonte, is titled "Fat Goddesses: Uh Huh,
That's Right!" and is described as a "slide show of multi-sized female deities and sacred 'big-boned
gals' from around the world." Viewers are invited "to participate in a 'taking up space' attitude!!"
Listing in "Cauldron of Events," Goddessing Regenerated 6 (1997): 1, 3.
22 A critique of this romanticism can be found in Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God
Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983), 84-85.
23 Monica Sjoo and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the
Earth, 2d ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).
24 See Gadon, plate 22.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 29
These images are much in keeping with spiritual feminists' emphasis on
female bodiliness and the qualifies they say this type of bodiliness imparts: nur
turance, intuition, compassion, a comfortableness with sexuality, and a strong
connection to nature. Rather than placing divinity in a transcendent, invisible
realm, spiritual feminists image the Goddess residing on planet Earth, some
times being planet Earth. In spiritual feminist art, vines twist about women's
limbs, their eyes form pools of water, their hair mimics flowers, and animals
sit on their laps or are born from between their legs. Judy Baca's 1976 por
trayal of Califia, the Amazon queen after whom California was named, shows a
sturdy woman whose arteries become tree roots and whose arms become tree
branches.25 The same theme is found in drawings that decorate the pages of
spiritual feminist magazines, such as an untitled piece by Wahaba Heartsun
showing the figure of a reclining woman whose breasts and hips double as hills,
and whose hair (head, underarm, and pubic) resembles trees.2 Such images are
intended to illustrate that the goddesses of feminist spirituality are immanent,
familiar, and completely comfortable in and inseparable from the natural world.
A number of prominent feminist artists of the past twenty-five years have
worked with similar themes. Indeed, there is an important link between the
feminist art movement and feminist spirituality. Some commentators have
argued that feminist art by early pioneers such as Leonora Carrington, Frida
Kahlo, and Georgia O'Keeffe is the very foundation for the feminist spirituality
movement.27 For others, the effect goes in the opposite direction, with feminist
art taking its inspiration from feminist spirituality.28 Whatever the direction of
influence, artists such as Judy Chicago, Meinrad Craighead, Louise Bourgeois,
Mayumi Oda, Nancy Spero, and Mary Beth Edelson have worked with themes
that simultaneously or later found their way into feminist spirituality. (Some of
these artists have explicitly defined themselves as part of the feminist spiritu
ality movement.) Feminist "body art" (which involves the artist's body in either
production or performance) is especially congenial to spiritual feminist the
alogy, and many of the resulting images have been adopted into the iconography
of feminist spirituality. Some of these, such as Mary Beth Edelson's Grapceva
Neolithic Cave: Seefor Yourself (1977) and Luisa Francia's Dragontime (1991),29
are basically photographic records of ritual acts that would be much at home in
the feminist spirituality movement. Also included in the iconography of feminist

25 See Orenstein, 92.

26 Wahaba Heartsun, illustration for "Fantasy Magick," by Nan Hawthorne, SageWoman 3,
no. 9 (Spring 9989 [1989]): 19. The date 9989 A.D.A (after the development of agriculture) is a date
of convention sometimes used in Goddess circles.
27 See, for example, Orenstein, chapters 4 and 5.
28 Gadon, 371.
29 Heide Gottner-Abendroth, The Dancing Goddess: Principles of a Matriarchal Aesthetic
(Boston: Beacon, 1991), plate 29 (for Edelson); Luisa Francia, Dragontime: Magic and Mystery of
Menstruation (Woodstock, N.Y.: Ash Tree Publishing, 1991), 48.

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30 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

spirituality is a variety of more abstract forms called "vaginal art" (pioneered

by Judy Chicago in The Dinner Party [1974-79]).30 In these images, women's
breasts and/or genitalia are given central treatment. For example, Clara Me
neres's Woman-Living Earth (1977) works with the theme of female-as-earth by
rendering the torso of a woman in sod and grass, shaping the soil and clipping
the turf to draw attention to nipples, navel, and pubic mound.31 With an implicit
reference to the Paleolithic Venus of Laussel, Ana Mendieta's Ruprestian Series
(1981) involved cutting female images into the limestone caves of a moun
tainous area outside Havana that, according to Gadon, "has traditionally given
shelter to Cuban rebels but was once sacred to the Goddess."32 Unlike the Venus
of Laussel, however, Mendieta's female figure has only rudimentary arms and
head and no breasts, but is dominated by an inverted teardrop-shaped vagina.
In a more populist vein, one of Wahaba Heartsun's drawings in a spiritual femi
nist magazine is a stylized vulva that is completely disembodied.33
These, then, are the female images that form the art and iconography of
feminist spirituality. I think there can be no question that these images are em
powering for some women. Spiritual feminists insist that they are so for them,
and there is no reason to doubt them. Certainly spiritual feminists do not feel
themselves to be objectified when they place a statuette of the "sleeping god
dess" of Malta or the Buddhist Tara on their altars, even if they are perfectly
capable of feeling objectified when they have to squeeze past a man poring over
a pornographic centerfold at their local newsstand. The goddess iconography of
feminist spirituality is not identical to mainstream representations of women,
and even when it is similar, the context in which it occurs shifts its meaning in a
more female-positive direction.
Still, I see two dangers arising from the representation of women and
goddesses in feminist spirituality. The first is the perpetuation-however un
intentional-of a long-standing tradition of objectifying women and reducing
them to their sexual parts. Though nonobjectifying representations of women
may be possible and spiritual feminists may ultimately prove this through their
art, placing such emphasis on often naked images of women is, I believe, a more
complex and treacherous undertaking than spiritual feminists take it to be.
The second danger is that representation itself, apart from any tradition of
objectifying women, may be problematic; something important may be lost
in consenting to one's own representation, to one's own reduction to an image on
a piece of canvas or in stone-a problem that extends to the representation of

30 See Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1979).
31 See Gadon, plate 24.
32 Ibid., 280-81.
33 Heartsun, illustration for "Fantasy Magick," 18.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 31
deities. The debate over this question has raged across cultures and millennia
and will not, of course, be answered here. On the one hand, Hebrew prophets
and Christian iconoclasts have railed against the presumption that the divine
can or should be imaged, and Muslim artists have generally refused to represent
either gods or humans.34 Some indigenous peoples have reacted with hostility
and suspicion to anthropologists armed with cameras, believing that the dupli
cation of images of themselves would diminish their personal autonomy, power,
and safety. On the other hand, Hindus, Buddhists, and Orthodox and Catholic
Christians have rich iconographic traditions that glory in multiple images of the
divine. Europeans began making images of specific human beings (especially
rich or important ones) from classical times forward, and that practice has only
mushroomed as photographic technologies have become widely available.
It is important to recognize that spiritual feminists do not choose to be
iconophiles out of ignorance or naivete. There are thealogical, philosophical,
and psychological reasons why spiritual feminists have opted for an extensive
iconography, many of which I have mentioned already. But there are benefits to
be gained from an iconoclastic position as well, and I think it might be helpful
for feminists to reconsider these.

Representing Women, Representing Men

Before asking whether spiritual feminist art has succeeded in breaking
out of a visual language that objectifies women, it may be helpful to discuss in
greater detail how some art theorists and feminists have understood the pro
cess of objectification. Many have argued that the very act of looking involves,
in Laura Mulvey's words, "taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a
controlling and curious gaze."35 If this is indeed the case, it is important to de
termine who is looking and who is being looked at. In Western culture, espe
cially with the advent of modern media, everyone does a tremendous amount
of looking-women as well as men. But what are they looking at? Dispropor
tionately (though obviously not exclusively) we, male and female alike, look at
women.

What does it mean for women to concentrate their gaze on themsel

other women, to "watch themselves being looked at," in John Berger's
A classic feminist answer is that this practice causes women to be split

34 See Lois Ibsen Al Faruqi, Islam and Art (Islamabad, Pakistan: National Hijra Cou
17; and Annemarie Schimmel, "Islamic Iconography," in Encyclopedia of Religion,
Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 7:64-67.
35 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Feminism and Film T
Constance Penley (New York: Routledge, 1988), 59.
36 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972), 47

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 32 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

between a viewing subject and a viewed object: she who looks, and she who is
looked at.37 The consequence, argues Sandra Lee Bartky, is "an estrangement of
[woman's] bodily being: On the one hand, she is it and is scarcely allowed to be
anything else; on the other hand, she must exist perpetually at a distance from
her physical self, fixed at this distance in a permanent posture of disapproval."38
The damage goes still one level further: as Nadya Aisenberg points out, "Women
are not only commodified by becoming objects of the gaze, but then castigated
for their internalization of this commodification as vanity and narcissism."39
Spiritual feminists are not unaware of this situation.40 In fact, they feel their
art removes the "distorting gaze" of male domination and allows women to see
themselves without mediation, or only through their own mediation. Heide Got
tner-Abendroth, a German spiritual feminist and proponent of what she calls "a
matriarchal aesthetic," describes the work of British artist Cosey Fanni Tutti as
an example of this self-determined, self-expressive representation of women.
Cosey Fanni Tutti photographs herself "in poses similar to those in porno
graphic or striptease pictures," but, as G6ttner-Abendroth maintains, "here
she is not an object but the artist, i.e., the subject reclaiming its identity.... She
presents herself here; everything is determined by her and seen through her
eyes.... Her life is now her own work without any outside influence."41
Cosey Fanni Tutti rarely appears in spiritual feminist iconography, but
Carolee Schneemann, a performance artist active in the 1960s and 1970s, is
still regarded among spiritual feminists as having given clear voice to what
they wish to say about bodiliness, femaleness, sex, and nature. Photographs of
Schneemann's performances continue to be reproduced in spiritual feminist
publications. One of these, Interior Scroll, first performed in 1975, involved
Schneemann removing her clothes, painting her body, and reading from a book.
Toward the end of the performance, she dropped the book and began reading
the text from a scroll she pulled out of her vagina, representing, she said, "the

37 Or, as some theorists would have it, he who looks and she who is looked at-"the gaze," as in
temalized by women, being considered "male." As Griselda Pollock explains, "To look at and enjoy
the sites of patriarchal culture we women must become nominal transvestites. We must assume a
masculine position or masochistically enjoy the sight of woman's humiliation." Vision and Difference
(New York: Routledge, 1988), 85.
38 Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination (New York: Routledge, 1990), 39-40.
See also Berger, 46; E. Ann. Kaplan, Women and Film (New York: Methuen, 1983), 205; Nead,
10; Mary Kelly, "Re-viewing Modernist Criticism," in Art in Theory: 1900-1990, ed. Charles Har
rison and Paul Woods (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), 1091; and Pollock, Vision and Differ
ence, 85.
39 Nadya Aisenberg, Ordinary Heroines: Transforming the Male Myth (New York: Continuum,
1994), 75.
40 Gadon, 285, 371-72; Gottner-Abendroth, 77, 80-81; Orenstein, 72, 82.
41 Gottner-Abendroth, 78. For additional discussion of the potential for authentic self-expres
sion in feminist body art, see Nead, 3-4, 46, 61, 63, 82, 108; and Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing
Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (New York: Penguin, 1995), 157, 280.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 33
serpentine manifestation of vulvic knowledge."42 The second of these pieces,
Eye Body (1963), is favored by spiritual feminists for the way it calls to mind the
Minoan "snake goddess."43 In it, Schneemann painted her face and lay down
with two snakes, which twined themselves around her naked body. Gadon inter
prets Eye Body as "a defiant act of exorcism. [Schneemann] wanted to ... free
women from the bonds of male-defined pornography, to give women back their
own bodies.... She was challenging the traditional use of the female nude in
Western art as an object to be manipulated."44
However, lacking the information that these performance pieces were de
signed to show the wisdom and power of female embodiedness, a viewer might
reasonably conclude that Interior Scroll was from a live sex show and Eye Body
from the pages of a porn magazine. Does this matter? Griselda Pollock suggests
that it does not, that "images are not received as discrete entities but in relation
to institutional frameworks and discourses. The work can be defined as 'femi
nist' at the moment it enters into the arena of these debates."45 Granting this
point, it still seems to me that the similarity between some spiritual feminist
art and male heterosexual pornography indicates an omission in most spiritual
feminist understandings of art: the role of the spectator.46 Spiritual feminists
frequently seem to assume that spectator reaction will invariably follow artist
intention. If the artist is a self-conscious feminist, the message the spectator re
ceives will be to see women, their bodies, sex, and nature in a new and liberating
light. Schneemann herself interprets her work like this:

Covered in paint, grease, chalk, ropes, plastic, I establish my body as

visual territory. Not only am I an image maker, but I explore the image
values of flesh as the material I choose to work with. The body may
remain erotic, sexual, desired, desiring but it is as well votive: marked,
written over in a text of stroke and gesture discovered by my creative
female will.47

Schneemann acknowledges freely that she is manipulating her body as a visual

object (contrary to Gadon's interpretation in the preceding paragraph), but she

42 Heresies Collective, The Great Goddess, rev. ed. (New York: Heresies Collective, 1982), 128.
See also Nead, 67-68.
43 Schneemann was not consciously aware of any connection between the Minoan "snake god
dess" and Eye Body at the time she created the piece, but she has since come to feel that there was a
relationship between them based on "iconographical similarities and personal connections." See
Orenstein, 75.
44 Gadon, 294.
45 Griselda Pollock, quoted in Nead, 62.
46 See Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, "Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art
Making," in Feminist Art Criticism, ed. Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer, and Joanna Frueh (New
York: HarperCollins, 1991), 89-93.
47 Carolee Schneemann, quoted in Gadon, 294.

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 34 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

feels that because her "female will" directs this manipulation, it is to be read as
self-expression and not objectification.
Yet images can clearly have an impact that their creators do not intend.
Spectators will, I believe, in the absence of a compelling reason to do otherwise,
read images such as Schneemann's in the established vocabulary for representa
tions of women.48 Therefore, what they will see is a sexual object; not the whole,
female, sexual, self-determining person Schneemann seeks to represent. The
presence of these images in spiritual feminist settings, in rituals, and on altars
may give women the compelling reason they need to read such images in non
traditional ways. But these images do not remain safely closeted within their
alternative religious world, nor are they intended to be so contained. Once
they are set free to reach a broader audience, it seems unlikely to me that they
will continue to be read as assertions of female autonomy and power. They will
simply be naked women. And we have all been trained from childhood on, by
everything from television commercials to art history classes, how to look at
naked women: appraisingly, possessively, dismissively. As Lucy Lippard put it in
1976, anticipating later feminist art theory, "A woman using her own face and
body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that sepa
rates men's use of women for sexual titillation and women's use of women to
expose that insult."49
A now hotly debated distinction between "naked" and "nude," originally
put forward by art historian Kenneth Clark, asserts that the nude is the body as
produced by culture, through art, while the naked is simply a body without
clothing.50 The nude elicits murmurs of aesthetic appreciation; the naked elicits
shock and embarrassment. And, not insignificantly, exposed female bodies are
typically "nude," while male bodies similarly exposed are "naked." As Melody
Davis explains, "The female body, omnipresent in all visual media, suggesting
nudity even when clothed, finds no equivalent in the male nude who, when he
appears, is quickly covered by silence, suppression, and outrage.""5
The conventions according to which women's nakedness can be viewed as
art while men's is generally hidden are not timeless universals. Classical Greeks
favored male nudes long before they began to peel away the clothing of their
goddesses. Late medieval artists routinely portrayed a naked Jesus suffering on

48 H. G. Kippenberg argues that "when we read a drawing we are looking for stereotypes we
have in mind already." "Iconography as Visible Religion," in Eliade, 7:5.
49 Lucy Lippard, quoted in Nead, 67.
50 See Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon, 1956). Lynda
Nead points out, quite rightly, that "the discourse on the naked and the nude ... depends upon the
theoretical possibility, if not the actuality, of a physical body that is outside of representation and
is then given representation, for better or worse, through art... [but] the body is always already in
representation" (16). Certainly this is true; but images of male and female nakedness, equally repre
sentations of the body, are coded quite differently.
51 Davis, 3.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 35
the cross, as well as a naked Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of
Eden. Renaissance artists painted nude men in-secular contexts and, like con
temporary feminist artists, sometimes used themselves as models.52 In fact, right
up until the late eighteenth century, the male model was the norm in drawing
classes and art studios.53 But another trend was already under way by the seven
teenth century, during which "the relationship between male artist and female
model [was] sexualized, artistic creativity [was] equated with sexuality, and
more specifically with male virility." By the nineteenth century, male nudity dis
appeared almost entirely in Western art, while the naked female assumed
center stage, with "nude" even becoming a shorthand for "female."54
Feminist commentators have tended to see the earlier predominance of
male nudes and the later predominance of female nudes as two variations of pa
triarchal representation. In the first case, the artist "identifies with God making
man," while in the second case he sees himself "as a Pygmalion who makes
in every sense of the word-his ideal woman."55 This argument draws our focus
back to the artist, for just as spectators are bound to some extent by the viewing
conventions of their culture, so are artists. Again, this is something that spiritual
feminists tend to overlook. In spiritual feminist interpretations of art, it is often
assumed that the artist can free herself from the visual lexicon of her own cul
ture, that her reasons for representing women and her manner of doing so are
chosen from a position of zero constraint. As Gottner-Abendroth says of Cosey
Fanni Tutti's art, "Her life is now her own work without any outside influence."
Such a claim is not credible. Why did she take poses typical of pornography and
striptease? It was because of outside influence, because there exists a tradition
of visual representation of women that emphasizes women's sexuality and takes
them as objects. Why did she choose to represent herself and not a model?
This is a more interesting question, for self-representation is a defining fea
ture of feminist "body art," and it is true to the self-referential intent of all spiri
tual feminist iconography. It is also, ironically, an instance of the same internal
splitting of viewing subject and viewed object characteristic of the ordinary ex
perience of women in a culture that objectifies them: with one "self" they are
their bodies and nothing more; with the other "self" they watch those bodies
and monitor them, "exercising a fearsome self-regulation."56 Now, female artists'
self-representations are not inevitably contrary to women's interests. As noted,
artistic conventions change and shift, images signify different things to different
generations and cultures. If male nudity can demonstrate male centrality and
dominance, as it did during the European Renaissance, why can't female nudity

52 See Margaret Walters, The Nude Male (London: Paddington, 1978), 96.
53 Nead, 47.
54 Walters, 181, 228.
55 Ibid., 13.
56 Nead, 10.

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36 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

convey a sense of women's power now, regardless of what it meant a hundred

years ago, ten years ago, or even yesterday?
Obviously it is the goal of most of feminist art, so designated, to represent
women in a manner that subverts the stereotyped representation of women in
contemporary culture. No feminist artist is trying to retrench the sexual objecti
fication of women. Particularly in the heyday of the feminist art movement in
the early 1970s, feminist artists set out to distinguish their self-representations
from male representations of women in as graphic a manner as possible. Pre
senting vaginal imagery and dealing with subjects such as menstruation, these
artists "challenged the aestheticization and sanitization of the female body
within patriarchal culture."57 Feminist artists broke the dominant code of the
female nude and attempted to show themselves as "speaking subjects," demon
strating visually how they experienced their own bodies. Although these women
were naked, they were not naked in the same way as in the elite art of nine
teenth- and twentieth-century Europe, nor in the same way as popular com
mercial images of female nudity today. There can be no doubt that talented
artists can and frequently do confound viewer reactions and established artistic
codes, and perhaps some spiritual feminist art is able to do just this for female
images. But neither spiritual feminists, as artists, nor their audiences can es
cape the larger context in which their art takes place, a context in which naked
women code quite directly as sex and as object. Trying to use the very means of
women's oppression to free them may be ingenious, but I question to what
degree it is successful. Is there a substitute?
As it happens, spiritual feminists are not looking for a substitute to feminist
body art, because they wish to keep much of the standard coding of female
nudes in place.58 Spiritual feminists, by and large, have no complaint with seeing
women as representing sex, the body, and nature; their complaint is rather that
sex, the body, and nature have been denigrated, and women along with them.
Their goal in representing women is not so much to deconstruct the standard
coding, then, but to set it in a positive light. As Carolyn McVickar Edwards out
lines the spiritual feminist project, "First, we take back, over and over again, the
sacredness of our Woman selves: our bodies; our sexualities, our birth-giving,
creation-making beings. Then we retrieve from misuse and abuse all the con
cepts the patriarchy relates to our femaleness: body, blood, under, deep, color,
dark, below, wetness, depth, intuition, divination."59 How better to accomplish
this project of celebrating nature and the body, of redeeming everything tradi
tionally associated with femaleness-if this is one's aim-than to use represen
tations of women?

57 Nead, 63.
58 Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body (New York: Rout
ledge, 1996), 14.
59 Carolyn McVickar Edwards, The Storyteller's Goddess (San Francisco: HarperSanFran
cisco, 1992), 5.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 37
I believe that there is at least one better way. If the goal is truly to redeem
nature and the body for the greater good of Western society, it must eventually
be a project of the entire culture and not just a project for women. According to
spiritual feminist logic, women know a great deal about the value of body and
nature from their long-standing relegation to this realm (or, as some would have
it, because women actually are closer to body and nature for biological reasons).
The people who really need to get in touch with the value of body and nature, it
would seem, are men. And I doubt, given past cultural experience, that they are
going to discover this value by contemplating pictures of naked women, or even
by standing idly by while women contemplate pictures of naked women. It is a
commonplace of feminist analysis that Western men have attempted for cen
turies to abstract themselves away from nature and the body, and to the ex
tent that they have been successful, it is largely because women have taken care
of-have been-the body stuff for them. This is not a scenario that feminist
spirituality, as it is currently constituted, disrupts or even attempts to disrupt,
since its art is not directed at men. But if spiritual feminists are truly committed
to fostering a harmonious relationship between human beings, materiality, and
the natural world, perhaps they should concentrate their attentions on imaging
men in ways that emphasize male embodiedness and connection to the natural
world.
Lynda Nead has championed feminist artists for representing female bod
ies as "a way of... reversing the gaze and enabling women to become the speak
ing subjects of discourse."60 However, feminists' artistic renderings of them
selves as goddesses or women are not reversals but rather variations upon the
objectification and, more importantly, self-objectification of women in Western
culture. Spiritual feminists continue to engage themselves in a form of narcis
sism, even if it is a much healthier form than, for example, contemplating pic
tures of fashion models to motivate one's self-starvation. There may be nothing
intrinsically wrong with this healthy narcissism, but the feminist art project is
incomplete so long as women avert their eyes-as patriarchal cultures have tra
ditionally trained them to do-from men.
It is this act, the act of looking at men, that is a far greater threat to the
status quo of gendered power inequalities. It is a true reversal of "the gaze" for
women to look at men-not peripherally, deferentially, but head-on. To some
extent, male dominance has thrived within an invisibility that spiritual feminist
art leaves untouched. As Peter Lehman states in Running Scared: Masculinity
and the Representation of the Male Body, "In patriarchal culture, when the
penis is hidden, it is centered.... Indeed, the awe surrounding the penis in pa
triarchal culture depends on either keeping it hidden from sight (as ... the
classical cinema does) or carefully regulating its representation (as the porno

60 Nead, 68.

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 38 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

graphic film does)."'6 Maryse Holder interprets the absence of male genitalia in
men's art as a source of power for men, explaining that "the penis was not for the
public consumption, but for the private exclusive enjoyment of men. Nor, of
course, were men to be sexually defined-in that regard, as in all others, they
were the see-ers, not the seen."62 When women represent themselves, they raise
the possibility of changing the way women are perceived, both by themselves
and by men. But when women represent men, they position themselves as sub
jects with eyes that look out at the world rather than exclusively back in upon
themselves. This is a powerful move, regardless of the outcome.
Some feminist artists (though no spiritual feminists) have already taken on
this project of representing men and their embodiedness. A mid-1970s exhibi
tion at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London featured 'Women's
Images of Men" (though it is interesting to note that in the book of essays based
on this exhibition, only slightly more than half of the illustrations were of naked
men unaccompanied by women).63 Sylvia Sleigh, also working in the mid-1970s,
painted several male nudes, using two models whom she apparently regarded as
embodiments of her personal male ideal.64 Connie Greene, while a student at
the Rhode Island School of Design in 1974, asked her (male) professors-who
taught drawing and painting using nude female models-if they themselves
would be willing to pose naked for her, and several agreed.65 Representations by
Sleigh and Greene confound the expectations for male nudity set up by Western
art, in which naked men are either suffering mortifications of the flesh (as in
Christian representations of Jesus or the saints) or taking heroic poses and en
gaging in physical activity (again emphasizing their subjectivity even as they
become objects on canvas or stone).66 In these feminist representations, men
are pictured unclothed and inactive, being naked rather thanjust happening to
be naked.
I do not mean to imply that men are necessarily women's objects of erotic
desire and should be portrayed as such by spiritual feminists in order to beat
men at their own game (which has arguably been about representing women as
objects of male desire). I mean only to draw attention to the simple fact that we
live within a culture that prizes gender duality, whatever our sexual orienta

61 Peter Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 28.
62 Maryse Holder, "Another Cuntree: At Last, a Mainstream Female Art Movement," in Raven,
Langer, and Frueh, 12.
63 Sarah Kent and Jacqueline Morreau, eds., Women's Images of Men (London: Pandora,
1985).
64 See Cassandra Langer, "Against the Grain: A Working Gynergenic Art Criticism," in Raven,
Langer, and Frueh, 120; and Walters, 317.
65 See Walters, 317.
66 See Carol Duncan, "The Aesthetics of Power in Modem Erotic Art," in Raven, Langer, and
Frueh,67-68.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 39
tion.67 And indeed, spiritual feminists, a few exceptions notwithstanding, prize
gender duality as much as-if not more than-the cultural mainstream. In the
world of feminist spirituality, "we" are women and "they" are men, and much of
what needs to be known about life, history, and the future can be read off this
duality. But men are visually prominent in feminist spirituality only in their ab
sence. Spiritual feminists rarely pause to acknowledge this.68
Lise Vogel worries that "the logical consequence [of representing men] ...
is a simple extension of current sexual conventions, so that men will become
more objectified and women will be permitted to participate in sexploitation as
oppressors."69 There is some evidence that this is already happening: sexually
suggestive images of men are increasingly found in mainstream advertising, and
responses to psychological surveys indicate that men are increasingly preoccu
pied with their appearance and less satisfied with their bodies.70 Yet one can
hope, from within a spiritual feminist worldview, that female representation of
men would lead not to an equality of objectification but to a recognition by all
that we are embodied; that no one has a monopoly on rational thought or bodily
connectedness; and that we can all take up the position of viewing subject and
viewed object interchangeably.
Providing women with a "gaze" of their own that can look beyond the self is
one possibility for feminist and spiritual feminist art, as is continuing the effort
to work with female imagery. These may in fact be the only possibilities we have.
Perhaps we cannot, or do not, live without representation, and if we wish to
redress gender inequalities or harms, we must do so, at least in part, through
visual attempts to "subjectify" women, to offer an emancipatory means of self
representation, or, potentially, to decenter the hegemony of gender altogether.7

Refusing Representation
There may be another possibility for spiritual feminist art, however: that of
refusing representation altogether, or at least taking a hiatus on the represen
tation of women. It may be that we are at a time, historically speaking, when the
set of meanings associated with the representation of women is so entrenched

67 Regardless of a significant presence of lesbians in the feminist spirituality movement (surely

more than in the general population), goddess images are almost uniformly read as idealized self
representations, not as expressions of lesbian desire. The woman who is seen is not the other, but a
manifestation of the self.
68 An exception is Elinor Gadon, who believes that "in time the new iconography will include a
new symbol of male identity, one not based on dominance and violence" (372).
69 Lise Vogel, "Fine Arts and Feminism," in Raven, Langer, and Frueh, 40.
70 David M. Gamer, "The 1997 Body Image Survey Results," Psychology Today, February
1997,42.
71 See, for example, Nead, 16; and Mary Ann Doane, "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female
Body," in Penley, 217-18.

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 40 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

that it is folly to try to communicate alternative conceptions of female existence

through the medium of naked women. And with eating disorders and expensive
cosmetic surgery continually on the rise, it might be a good time to insist that
women have a value far beyond the shape or size of their bodies.72 This is not to
say that societies cannot exploit women without objectifying them in visual
images. Male dominance has all sorts of tools in its chest, and objectifying rep
resentation is only one technique (as the relative lack of objectifying repre
sentations of women in patriarchal cultures such as classical Athens or con
temporary Iran attests). But, given that it has been an extraordinarily successful
technique in Western culture, especially in recent years, there is something
to be said for refusing to play that game rather than simply calling for different
rules.
In addition, there is a certain religious appeal to swearing off the repre
sentation of women or, more particularly, goddesses. Let me illustrate by high
lighting a photograph from Ana Mendieta's 1977 series Tree of Life. Here is
how Gadon describes this image: "Her naked body bathed in mud, [Mendieta]
stands against an enormous tree, a living icon."73 The word icon here resonates
with power, and since this is a female image, we might expect that power to de
volve upon women. But for whom do icons exist? Never for themselves. Their
existence is always for another's use. Though an icon is a different type of object,
perhaps, than a woman in a slinky dress slithering across the hood of a car in
an automobile advertisement, it is nevertheless an object. Thus, it need not be
surprising that goddesses have been represented and worshiped in many locales
on the globe without any concomitant rise in the social, political, or economic
status of human women.74 Even in the prehistoric world, which is reconstructed

72 Feminist spirituality often claims that women are more in tune with their bodies and less in
clined to be alienated from material nature than men. Yet one could argue that the evidence cuts the
other way: that women are more alienated from their bodies than men, because they are more will
ing to inflict pain on their bodies in the pursuit of an attractive appearance and are generally more
dissatisfied with their bodily selves. See, for example, Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism,
Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 57;
and Bartky, 66.
73Gadon, 279.
74 Discussions of the relationship between goddess worship and women's social status can be
found in LarryW. Hurtado, ed., Goddesses in Religions and Modern Debate (Atlanta: Scholars Press,
1990); James J. Preston, ed., Mother Worship: Themes and Variations (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1982); Cynthia Humes, "Glorifying the Great Goddess or Great Woman?"
in Women and Goddess Traditions, ed. Karen L. King (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997);
Lauren E. Talalay, "A Feminist Boomerang: The Great Goddess of Greek Prehistory," Gender and
History 6 (1994): 165-83; Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gen
der and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon, 1986); Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In
the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth (New
York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993); and Eller, Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 41
as a women's paradise in most spiritual feminist discourse, we have no hard evi
dence that goddess worship had any positive effect on the status of women, or
indeed that goddess worship was not accompanied by worship of a far greater,
unseen and never represented male god.75
Spiritual feminists show no lack of integrity in representing the female
divine; this is perfectly in keeping with a thealogy that makes deity polymor
phous (in a common spiritual feminist formulation, "the Goddess with ten thou
sand names") yet sufficiently immanent that she can be represented. But the
iconographic choices of feminist spirituality leave in place a tradition in which
goddesses can be trivialized-seen as the exotic deities of foreign cultures or the
stuff of fantasy novels-while the male god hovers invisibly in the subconscious,
exerting an at times overwhelming force. Feminist spirituality did not create
this tradition, and it stands in firm opposition to it. It will change this tradition
if it can. But until this tradition is successfully undermined, feminist spirituality
in Western culture perforce plays to a broader audience that has been schooled,
on the one hand, to accept the all-powerful God's near-invisibility and to expe
rience it as a sign of his strength; and, on the other hand, to associate icono
graphic representation with spirits, saints, and deities who are lower in the di
vine pecking order.
Taken together, the dominant Western religious traditions-Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam-are strongly iconoclastic. Both Islam and Judaism have
produced religious art, but neither permits any representation whatsoever of
God.76 Christianity is a more delicate case, as it has never had a consensus re
garding the representation of God. Most early Christians believed, in concert
with Greek philosophical aniconicism, that "God was invisible and could not be
represented... because God was an immaterial and spiritual being."77 But later

75 There is some archaeological and ethnographic support for the possibility that iconic
goddess worship was accompanied by worship of a supreme male god who was never represented
and would therefore never turn up in the material record. This combination has been attested,
for example, in the case of some African and American indigenous religions. In addition, in one
archaeological excavation dating to Iron Age Israel, large numbers of female figurines were re
covered, but virtually no male figurines (Frymer-Kensky, 158-61). It is only because of existing
written records-the Hebrew scriptures-that we know that this culture was "really" worship
ing a god. That is, the worship of a god was the official religion of Israel, from which any putative
goddess worship indicated by the figurines would have been considered a deviation, perhaps even
a heresy.
76 See Alan Unterman, "Judaism," in A New Handbook of Living Religions, ed. John R. Hin
nells (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 44-45; and Jacob Neusner, "Studying Ancient Judaism through
the Art of the Synagogue," in Art as Religious Studies, ed. Douglas Adams and Diane Apostolos
Cappadona (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 30-31; Al Faruqi, 7: 14-18; and Schimmel, 7: 64-65.
77 Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), x-xi.

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 42 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Christians developed a rich and elaborate iconography, in spite of spates of

iconoclasm (most notably between 724 and 843 C.E. in Byzantium and in West
ern Europe during the Protestant Reformation).78 Still, in all this religious art,
representation of the Father God of Christianity is quite rare compared to that
of Jesus, Mary, and other biblical and religious figures. It is often limited to "a
series of symbols and images," such as "the right hand with which he created
and judged, the triangle inscribed with an eye, the initial T (for Theos), and a tri
angle surrounded by rays of light."79
Jesus, the second person of the Christian trinity, has been imaged at least as
often as any other religious figure. Since, according to Christian orthodoxy,
Jesus is "fully divine," images of him could be considered by the devout to be
images of God.80 But standing behind Jesus-usually invisibly-is the Father
God. The omnipotent divine to whom Jesus speaks, to whom Jesus defers while
on earth ("thy will be done"), lives in the heavens, somewhere that human eyes
cannot reach. Anthropomorphic images of the Father God did appear in both
Western and Eastern Christendom through the Middle Ages and can be found
yet today in some Orthodox and Roman Catholic iconography. The old man
with the long white beard whom so many of us visualize when we think of God
the Father is not the product of some mythic collective unconscious nor of
explicit verbal instruction in church school classes, but rather of a persistent
(though often purposely obscured) iconography of God in this form. Still, the
iconoclastic tendency in relation to God in the Christian tradition is very strong.
Both believers and nonbelievers in North America and Western Europe gen
erally understand that the referent of the term God is invisible (moreover,
incapable of representation) and nominally male, in spite of, on the one hand,
occasional representations that belie God's invisibility, and on the other hand,
theological apologetics that insist on "his" lack of gender.
These are the cultures in which spiritual feminists make their bid for female
divinity. Their Goddess or goddesses are inevitably compared to this invisible
(or barely visible) male God. And, barring any great sea change in Western the
ology, in comparison to this God, the Goddess will appear lesser and more easily
contained, simply because she can be imaged. Spiritual feminists are banking on
such a sea change; indeed, they are actively trying to bring it on. Unless and until
this day arrives, representing the Goddess may make her especially accessible

78 See Finney, 3; Virgil Candea, "Iconoclasm," trans. Sergiu Celac, in Eliade, 7: 1-2; and
John W. Cook, "Christian Iconography," in Eliade, 7: 60-61.
79 Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Dictionary of Christian Art (New York: Continuum, 1994),
146.
80 This is especially the case in the Pantocrator icon of Christ found in Eastern Christianity,
which "emphasizes the presence of Christ as coetemal and coexistent with God the Father." Cook,
59.

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 Eller: Divine Objectification 43
and attractive to people (in the same way that many Christians save their devo
tion for Mary, Jesus, or the saints, all of whom can be portrayed), but at the same
time it will tend to undercut her divine power. In other cultures, in other con
texts (even earlier in the history of Western culture), the opposite might be the
case: visual images of goddesses might be just the thing to advance the feminist
project. But in this culture at this time, goddess iconoclasm has merits that are
too often overlooked.
In some of the earliest words attributed to him in the Hebrew Bible, God
says that he is not to be reduced to images of any kind; not even so much as a
name should be applied to him. "I am," he says, and insists that that will have to
be enough.81 This gives God a power and a mystery, and, it could be argued, it
gives men a power too, by virtue of their shared gender with this God. It seems
to me that this sort of power-the power of being beyond representation, the
sense that there is something too grand, too indeterminate, too full of potenti
alities to be captured in an image, or even in many images-might be healthy
for women at this time. What spiritual feminists might be best advised to do,
then, is to invoke a Goddess who is mysterious and unseen and unknowable, and
to appropriate a little of her power-the power of being beyond represen
tation-for women. On the face of it, this approach seems incompatible with
the immanent, material thealogy that feminist spirituality takes as its corner
stone, but I see no reason why the inability to be captured in images necessarily
translates to transcendence, to a deity that is outside, beyond, or at an infinite
separation from mere mortals. Perhaps the Goddess could be regarded as the
immanent mystery that is around us and in us, invisibly permeating our exis
tence and the entire natural world with her wonder and power.
Whatever course we take, the road ahead is not easy. If, with spiritual femi
nists, we strive to image women and the Goddess in new, empowering ways, we
will be swimming against a powerful cultural tide of fe-male objectification, one
that shows no signs of abating. If, on the other hand, we attempt to refuse rep
resentation, we run the risk that that same tide of female objectification will
rush in to fill the visual void we leave behind. Just as the new pictures we paint
of ourselves may be imbued with old meanings by spectators, a vocal claim to
visual privacy may be heard as a return to Victorian modesty, or-just as bad
it may not be heard at all. We live in a profoundly visual culture. Speaking to this
culture may require images, in which case spiritual feminists are heading in the
right direction. I think it is too soon to know which strategy will work best to free
women from images of themselves that demean, stereotype, or objectify them.
But before casting our lot with the purveyors of putatively new, nonobjectifying

81 In Exod. 19:21 and 33:20, "we are told that the person who looks upon God face-to-face must
die." In Exod. 20:4a, God tells Moses that any representation of him is explicitly forbidden. Finney,
ix-x. Deut. 27:15 repeats this theme. Moshe Barasch, "Jewish Iconography," in Eliade, 7: 54.

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44 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

images of women, we might pause to consider where men, who are compara
tively underrepresented, fit into this picture; how we are going to approach the
current invisibility of the Western male God, who continues to be a deep psy
chological force whether or not he is accepted at a theological level; and finally,
how we might best proclaim the power and beauty of the female divine.

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