Human Rights or Symbolic Status?

Morny Joy

One of the more fascinating questions being asked today is whether women’s rights are applicable to the dimension of religion. In many ways, this would seem to be problematic. This is because women’s rights, even when they are accepted as applicable to the category of freedom from violence, still seem to have reference only to the secular domain. Though I think that, in time, the present binary separation between the public, secular, and political domain and the private, religious domain will need to be revised, at present the claim that women can appeal to human rights in the realm of religion sounds strange to many, at best.

A strategy that I have been using in classes on the topic of women in world religions is something I call "symbolic status." This term has certain religious resonances and refers to the regard or level of spiritual standing that is accorded to women in a religious tradition. I started to employ this term, because I did not find a congenial category when I searched the basic feminist analysis of oppression or the French feminist approach, which claims that women have always been excluded and remain the repressed element of male-oriented Western culture. Such a diagnosis accepts too readily the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic approach that honors the phallus as being universally valid.

Instead, when employing the measure of symbolic status as an indicator of women’s representation in a given religion, I ask a number of questions:

1.            Have women been accorded the same spiritual respect and stature as men? Can they  become leaders of both men and women?

2.            Are women accepted as ritual specialists who are allowed to perform the same religious activities as men or, if they enact different ritual roles, are these roles regarded as not in any way inferior to the roles of men?

3.            Do women have access to learning the specific sacred language of their religion, to translating and commenting on these texts, and to reading them at public ceremonies?

4.            Is a woman’s body regarded as impure, polluted, or a distraction? Is it viewed as less worthy of honor and thus liable to be exploited?

The specific terms used may vary according to the religion but, by and large, it is extraordinarily difficult to find a religion where women have been given the same symbolic status as men in all of the above categories, unless they are religions of women only.

In order to ground this theory of symbolic status, I use the example Bhikkhuni Dhammananda, whose temple and facilities near Bangkok in Thailand I have visited twice. In her writings and her advocacy for the full ordination of bhikkunis in Thailand, Bhikkhuni Dhammananda indicates a connection between the low symbolic status of women in Thailand and the violence and disrespect with which they are treated, especially in the sex trade. Her argument is that by allowing the ordination of nuns, women’s "symbolic status" (not her term) would be raised or strengthened. Such a move, on her account, would also help to alleviate the disrespect and abuse to which women are submitted in many aspects of Thai culture.