From Subjectivity to Recognition: Genderealogy and Paradigm Shift

This entry is part of a series of responses to Theological Genealogies of Modernity, a special issue of Modern Theology edited by Darren Sarisky, Pui-Him Ip, and Austin Stevenson. In this piece, Christine Helmer and Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, co-authors of “Genderealogy: Erasure and Repair,” respond to Caroline Wills’s reading of their article.

We thank Caroline Wills for paying attention to the innovative aspects of the shift from genealogy to genderealogy that we proposed in our essay. We appropriated an understanding of the entangled subject from Schleiermacher—a subject whose agency is reciprocally related to their passivity in the world: who both acts and is acted upon. According to this understanding, a person is inevitably connected to others through the mutual reciprocities of the social “ecosystem” (a term that Katherine Songeregger has used to describe Schleiermacher”s understanding of the world’s natural causal nexus), so that communities can be created and described without obeisance to the already established genealogy model.

In the conference on Theological Genealogies of Modernity that provided the impetus for our original genderealogy essay, we found ourselves using the word “rupture” to make the point that new theological ideas, notions, and paradigms can emerge from unexpected and surprising places to redirect the course of theological conversation. Rupture in this sense provided us with a category for describing the emergence of new knowledge. However, it would be misleading (and useless for the cause of genderealogy) to use this word rupture, if by using it, we simply returned to thinking of agency and selfhood in terms that we associate with the “great men” of modern genealogy. Rather the question must now be posed on the basis of our different account of subjectivity: how can we reflect on the social dimensions to such rupture? How can genderealogically produced knowledge be recognized as a valid contribution to academic research and debate when it is not templated onto a previously established linear progress narrative? What—as Wills rightly prompts us to ask—if it belongs to a genre, or approach, or mode of thinking that lies outside of traditional academic discourse or historiography? If genealogy accounts for the production of knowledge in incremental steps that build on a previously established template, then the recognition of that knowledge requires buying into the structure of recognition anticipated by the established model. Even those who fight to be “gamechangers” must still articulate their innovations in relation to the existing norm. But what if knowledge is produced “outside” the established structure? What if, indeed, it can take on disarmingly different forms and genres? Can it be recognized as knowledge rather than the fantasies of the “mystic,” “visionary,” or perhaps the “village crazy lady” (to cite Wills)?

The story of rupture is often told by innovative women. Most recently Katalin Karikó—who won the 2023 Nobel Prize for medicine, together with her University of Pennsylvania colleague Drew Weissman—has told the story of her work on mRNA that became the basis for the rapid development of the Covid-19 vaccine in 2021. In recent interviews, Dr. Karikó describes how her departmental chairs and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania had told her that she was not “of faculty quality” and disparaged her work because it did not bring in the external funding that is required by the university to secure the rank of tenure. Karikó left the university in 2013 to work for a German startup, BioNTech, which later collaborated with Pfizer to make the first COVID vaccine. Without her decades-long research on mRNA, her persistence in the face of many roadblocks that colleagues put in her way because they were unable to recognize the ground-breaking nature of her research, even calling it “heretical,” she would not have been able to develop the COVID vaccine so rapidly. We have her character–her trust in the intrinsic value of her research–to thank for the gift of the vaccine.

Genderealogy focuses on stories like Karikó’s. How can it be that such rupture from the norm is only recognized decades later as scientific innovation and then rewarded? Genderealogy helps to provide an explanation. It is clear that all too often, woman-as-agent of knowledge production is not easily recognized in the genealogy model; her innovation is perceived as rupture of the existing paradigm and thus eludes mapping as a step on the incremental ladder of scientific progress. The expectations, societal roles, and forms of life that are traditionally attached to her gender, which in turn are tied up with the mode of her innovation, rupture genealogy. Financial and existential stability, habits and norms surrounding social behavior, and institutional acceptance are all, too, part of the picture here, which is why gender is of course far from the only condition for exclusion and vulnerability in this system. Knowledge does not count as knowledge unless it is accepted as such by the scientific community. For the benefit of all innovators, then–not simply women, but mutually entwined creative subjects of all genders—a paradigm shift of Kuhnian proportions is what is at stake in genderealogy. How can innovative contributions be recognized when they do not conform to existing paradigms? In our advocacy of genderealogy as an approach for engaging with “the history of ideas,” we suggest a return to the category of “rupture.”

Indeed, rupture is central to genderealogy. Genderealogy breaks with our present institutional systems where they conform to genealogical knowledge production. Rather than fixing agents who posit incremental steps on the ladder of knowledge progress, genderealogy names free-floating signifiers who create communities for mutual research support. In some cases rupture is existentially necessary for human survival, as is the case with Kariko's scientific discoveries that saved human life. In others, rupture is the relationality of the subject articulated in Emily Dickenson’s poem. The social critic Ivan Illich once drew on the evocative imagery of a flower growing through a stone, and breaking the stone, in order to articulate his own distinctive understanding of cultural and institutional revolution. If we use this imagery here, it can become a powerful image of how new beginnings—the most surprising ruptures and disruptions—can come from unlikely (and sometimes overlooked) places within our existing “eco-system.”

Christine Helmer is Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and is co-author (with Amy Carr) of Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times (Baylor University Press 2023).

Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft is a Bye-Fellow in Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, and teaches on the University's Foundation Year programme. She is co-editor with Simon Goldhill of Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity: The Shock of the Old (Cambridge University Press 2023).