Beyond the Veil: Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation

Abstract

The final section of chapter 4 asserts the moral problem of “making men” as a three-pronged dilemma. “Making men,” especially toward the end of religious leadership, is a moral problem in its most elementary expression because, before all else, it contends that the prerequisite of madeness or rather, personhood, is maleness. When examined through the lens of the Social Gospel’s sociohistorical method, “making men” further emphasizes the exclusion of women and other differentiated bodies by way of its phenomenological contention that “God is mine and not yours;” that is, that certain male bodies have been endowed with divine authority to gaze and act upon those who are not-made men. Finally, the very notion of making (and/or “building men” to be more consistent with Benjamin E. Mays’s articulation) implies that personhood is primarily created and/or constructed by an external gaze that designates othered bodies that defy established normativity as no-thing. In short, the moral problem of “making men” is that the identity of the oppressed is circumscribed by the same oppressive societal norms that it seeks to escape in the very act of its “making.”