Woman without a Name: Gender Identity in Sacrificial Stories

Sacrifice may be a topic of intense philosophical-theological academic debate, but it is also the everyday experience of millions of ordinary people. Either as the one who is sacrificing or as the one who is being sacrificed, we all encounter sacrifice in our own skin. Scholarly reflection on sacrifice has produced an ambiguous discourse which stretches across numerous disciplines from anthropology, to religious and social studies, to ethics. The golden thread of my project, which brings together diverse philosophical-theological disciplines such as phenomenology, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and gender studies, is the very human experience of sacrifice. Therefore, unlike other, predominantly comparative perspectives, this study is oriented towards the individual. My interlocutors on the subject will include Soren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Jan Patocka, Jacques Derrida, René Girard, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. Sacrifice has of course developed within the religious-cultic context and can be traced in global religions and local cults alike. The background of this research is the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, but it also reaches into Greek mythology for comparison. The main biblical sources are the sacrificial stories of the binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) and the sacrifice of Jephthahs daughter (Judges 11: 29-40); comparison will be made with the story from Greek mythology of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, a drama rendered by Euripides. However, it is the secularised form of sacrifice which we face in our daily lives. Whether in trivial expressions such as, Ill sacrifice myself and go and make dinner, or more serious ones such as, Ill sacrifice myself in order that you may live, it seems that the logics of sacrifice form the very basis of human relations. Theorists of sacrifice outside gender studies either deny or disregard the fact that sacrifice is always gendered. The experience of sacrifice would nonetheless suggest that it is: women receive lower wages than men for the same work, and women are expected to combine their career with care for the family, to name but two out-workings of the gendered nature of sacrifice. This project aims to connect the academic debate around the biblical and mythical stories of the sacrifice of women and their interpretations in philosophy and theology, which because they are usually separated, do not achieve the potential wealth of colourful interpretations. Based on my findings, I aim to contribute to the discussion on thinking human relations especially their gendered aspects outside the sacrificial discourse, and without heaping condemnation on the sources of our Judeo-Christian tradition.

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