Aint I A Womanist Too?”:
Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought 
Date: February 25 - 26, 2010
Location: Claremont, California

In the mid 1980s, ethicist Katie G. Cannon invoked Alice Walker’s term “womanist” to articulate the particularities of black women’s religious experiences.  Since that time, a cadre, a first generation of black female religious scholars, fought for inclusion into a white-racialized and male dominated theological discourse, while a second generation of womanists began to take up additional issues such as health and class in a more fervent manner. Thus the second generation of womanist religious thought began to reflect more fully about pressing issues of their historical moment – issues beyond gendered inclusion. Since then, womanist approaches to religious studies have grown to constitute an entire contextual movement within theology and religious studies.
 
Thus womanist approaches to religion have joined in the larger movement of U.S. and global liberation theologies that consciously describe the identity and experiences of the marginalized, and declare that the power of divinity and the force of religion resist their oppression.  In so doing, womanist theological thought is one of these brave theologies that ‘shook’ the foundations of and created space within the western academy.

And yet the category of identity, of what it means to be a “black woman,” constructed to empower the women whose experiences have been so marginalized by a larger academy and society, can also serve to constrain and limit the field.  That is, black womanhood and black women’s religiosity is as diverse as the world’s vast populace.  We are southern, Protestant, heterosexual descendants of the U.S. slavery system, and yet, we are also, and have always been geographically expansive, queer, multicultural, diasporic, and representative of a rich tapestry of religiosities within and beyond Christianity. While this diversity is not novel, the postmodern condition in which we find our complicated placements in the world call for new ways of seeing, of knowing, and doing—which seemingly beg something different and something new of our religious and theological projects.
 
Our understanding of ‘experience’ becomes more and more attenuated; religious expressions continue to blur and transgress traditional persuasions; our raced, sexed, and gendered subjectivities continue to transgress stagnate identity signifiers, and the grave injustices in our society call for more democratic political possibilities.  
And so, it is these unique, messy and beautiful complications that demand more of our religious and theological doing—that our growing recognition of diversity demand a new theological posture, necessitates a “third wave” in our sea of raced, gendered, sexed, classed, political and religious multiplicity—a new wave which is already here and yet continually emerging on our theological and religious horizons of impossible possibilities. 
 
“Third Wave” womanist religious thought inherits and lifts up the legacy of its strong womanist heritage and remains faithfully unfaithful to its discursive history. Like all womanist religious thought, this third wave is grounded in black women’s religiosity.  This third wave celebrates hybridity, tension and complexity; it is Christian and non-Christian, straight and queer, historical and yet postmodern, political and rich with philosophical and cultural criticism, and lastly, committed to an open-ended vision of possibility.

Sojourner Truth critiqued the default understanding of black womanhood with her poignant question, “Ain’t I a woman?” and expanded notions of blackness, womanhood and work for generations of scholars and activists.  Likewise, this third wave of womanist religious thought redefines and extends, from within and without, what it means to place black women’s religious experiences at the center of theological activity and religious reflection.  
 
Challenging boundaries and expanding discourse, this “third wave” conference offers an opportunity to diversely engage the rugged terrains of our contemporary condition by drawing on the strengths of womanist religious scholarship while also departing from the inherited tradition.  Together a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious group of scholars and attendees will think together on how to articulate and live into this third wave that cares for the varied lived religious experiences of women of African descent and craves justice, wellness, wholeness, freedom and quality of life.