Emilie M Townes
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 4587946 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Emilie M Townes |
| PRENOMES | Emilie M |
| SOBRENOME | Townes |
| ASSINATURA | TOWNES E M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6999-7764 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 20 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 37 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 20 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1993 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Shadow Boxing the Ridiculous
Primarily, my work has focused on the study of the nature of evil(s). I explore it as an inter-structural phenomenon and its impact on individuals and groups through its dehumanizing effects. In this essay, I use the concepts of the shocking, the outrageous, and the indecent to frame and structure a critique of the academic world’s genuine deficiencies in addressing oppression and the role that we, as ethicists, may play in this. Given the curren…
On Making the Silence Loud
The Womanist Dancing Mind
Structures
Structures Emilie M. Townes (bio) Perhaps the dilemma Judith points to so well—historically and currently—can best be summed up with what I think of as a truism: Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR) is still a white space because it is a white space, and it is a space that privileges the study of Christian traditions. These totally value-laden assertions are blunt assessments on my part. They are my admission that, for as much time and energy that …
In Memoriam
Journal Article In Memoriam: The Power of Testimony: Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928–May 28, 2014) Get access Emilie M. Townes Emilie M. Townes * *Emilie M. Townes, a former President of the American Academy of Religion, is Dean and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt Divinity School. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar…
Presidential Address
Invisible Things Spoken
Our postmodern culture suffers from the enormous impact of market forces on everyday life. We live in an era where the United States has replaced Europe as the global hegemonist. There is an increase of political polarizations along the lines of nation, race, gender (sex, sexuality, sex roles, sexual orientation, sexism), class, denomination and faith traditions. In our world, culture is sanitized and then commodified. This process of changing ae…
Legends Are Memories Greater than Memories
I begin with part of the actual text of the special field orders because I find many things about it noteworthy. First, the phrase “and a mule” is no where to be found—not in sections 1 and 3 above, not in sections 2, 4, 5, or 6 that are more concerned about loyalty to the Union and military service and defense. Second, this was a decidedly un-universal field order. The boundaries are clear: islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fiel…
To Pick One’s Own Cotton
Public policymaking is, regrettably, often seen as exclusively political or social. 2 The sometimes deeply religious and/or theological underpinnings of our basic attitudes concerning the nature of peoples and the kind of public policies we must respond with remains unacknowledged or unconscious. We are often unaware that moral landscapes are driving our public policy decisions and that this makes our public policy decision-making problematic at …
Vanishing into Limbo
In this 1955 essay, Baldwin explores Richard Wright’s novel Native Son to illuminate what it means to be a Negro in America. For Baldwin, this is visceral. He is tired of Black folk being treated as mere social agendas rather than as flesh and blood. He notes that dehumanization is never a one-way street, that the loss of identity—be it stolen, borrowed, denied, or annihilated—has consequences far beyond those who are the immediate victims. For B…
Growing like Topsy
Solidarity amidst our differences in the face of structural evil may seem to be an exercise in tempting the agony of the absurd. Stowe’s introduction of the character Topsy in her abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is a case in point. In this acutely troubling introduction we have of Topsy, Stowe exposes us to the traditional stereotypes of Black women slaves (regardless of age). Topsy is black, her eyes are round and they shine—they actually…
Everydayness
We begin with ourselves. Each of us must answer the question: What will we do with the fullness and incompleteness of who we are as we stare down the interior material life of the cultural production of evil? Rather than content ourselves with the belief that the fantastic hegemonic imagination, the motive force behind the cultural production of evil, is a force that sits outside of us, we must answer remembering that we are in a world that we ha…
Sites of Memory
In her essay “The Site of Memory” Toni Morrison explains how her work can be situated within the genre of the memoir. Her essay helps introduce several major themes of this chapter and the book as a whole: imagination, history, the fantastic, the power of images, and memory. She begins her discussion with slave narratives that, she notes, say two things: “This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but it also repres…
The Womanist Dancing Mind
This quotation is taken from Morrison’s acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1996. As such, Morrison focuses on the dangers, the necessities, and the pleasures of the reading/writing life in the late twentieth century. For her, the dangers are captured in two anecdotes. In one, it is the danger that, in her words, “our busied-up, education-as-horse-race, trophy-driven cul…
Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil
This groundbreaking book provides an analytical tool to understand how and why evil works in the world as it does. Deconstructing memory, history, and myth as received wisdom, the volume critically ex
The Contribution of JFSR to Shaping the Field
i find the notion of "the field" to be a curious one this was heightened when i typed in field in the "look it up" line of my Visual Thesaurus program1 as you can see an interesting set of options emerges the field can be an enclosed piece of land that is treeless a battle region a place where practical work is done or data collected away from the studio or office or library or laboratory the space around a radiating body a particular environment…
The Contribution of FSR to Shaping the Field
Roundtable Discussion
Mary E. Hunt, Marvin M. Ellison, Emilie M. Townes, Patrick S. Cheng, Martha Ackelsberg, Judith Plaskow, Angela Bauer-Levesque, Roundtable Discussion: Same-Sex Marriage, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall, 2004), pp. 83-117
Panel Response to Marcella Althaus-Reid's Indecent Theology
Marcella Althaus-Reid puts in print a discussion of sex, gender, and politics. For womanist theologian and ethicist, Townes, black women's experiences have been left out of the theoretical and material constructs of both black and feminist theologies in the United States. Townes argues that Althaus-Reid casts the reader in the role of voyeur as she describes (and objectifies) the women lemon vendors in Indecent Theology. The reader observes them …
To Be Called Beloved
Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil
This groundbreaking book provides an analytical tool to understand how and why evil works in the world as it does. Deconstructing memory, history, and myth as received wisdom, the volume critically ex
Presidential Address
To Be Called Beloved
Panel Response to Marcella Althaus-Reid's Indecent Theology
Marcella Althaus-Reid puts in print a discussion of sex, gender, and politics. For womanist theologian and ethicist, Townes, black women's experiences have been left out of the theoretical and material constructs of both black and feminist theologies in the United States. Townes argues that Althaus-Reid casts the reader in the role of voyeur as she describes (and objectifies) the women lemon vendors in Indecent Theology. The reader observes them …
Roundtable Discussion
Mary E. Hunt, Marvin M. Ellison, Emilie M. Townes, Patrick S. Cheng, Martha Ackelsberg, Judith Plaskow, Angela Bauer-Levesque, Roundtable Discussion: Same-Sex Marriage, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall, 2004), pp. 83-117
The Contribution of JFSR to Shaping the Field
i find the notion of "the field" to be a curious one this was heightened when i typed in field in the "look it up" line of my Visual Thesaurus program1 as you can see an interesting set of options emerges the field can be an enclosed piece of land that is treeless a battle region a place where practical work is done or data collected away from the studio or office or library or laboratory the space around a radiating body a particular environment…
The Contribution of FSR to Shaping the Field
Invisible Things Spoken
Our postmodern culture suffers from the enormous impact of market forces on everyday life. We live in an era where the United States has replaced Europe as the global hegemonist. There is an increase of political polarizations along the lines of nation, race, gender (sex, sexuality, sex roles, sexual orientation, sexism), class, denomination and faith traditions. In our world, culture is sanitized and then commodified. This process of changing ae…
Legends Are Memories Greater than Memories
I begin with part of the actual text of the special field orders because I find many things about it noteworthy. First, the phrase “and a mule” is no where to be found—not in sections 1 and 3 above, not in sections 2, 4, 5, or 6 that are more concerned about loyalty to the Union and military service and defense. Second, this was a decidedly un-universal field order. The boundaries are clear: islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fiel…
To Pick One’s Own Cotton
Public policymaking is, regrettably, often seen as exclusively political or social. 2 The sometimes deeply religious and/or theological underpinnings of our basic attitudes concerning the nature of peoples and the kind of public policies we must respond with remains unacknowledged or unconscious. We are often unaware that moral landscapes are driving our public policy decisions and that this makes our public policy decision-making problematic at …
Vanishing into Limbo
In this 1955 essay, Baldwin explores Richard Wright’s novel Native Son to illuminate what it means to be a Negro in America. For Baldwin, this is visceral. He is tired of Black folk being treated as mere social agendas rather than as flesh and blood. He notes that dehumanization is never a one-way street, that the loss of identity—be it stolen, borrowed, denied, or annihilated—has consequences far beyond those who are the immediate victims. For B…
Growing like Topsy
Solidarity amidst our differences in the face of structural evil may seem to be an exercise in tempting the agony of the absurd. Stowe’s introduction of the character Topsy in her abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is a case in point. In this acutely troubling introduction we have of Topsy, Stowe exposes us to the traditional stereotypes of Black women slaves (regardless of age). Topsy is black, her eyes are round and they shine—they actually…
Everydayness
We begin with ourselves. Each of us must answer the question: What will we do with the fullness and incompleteness of who we are as we stare down the interior material life of the cultural production of evil? Rather than content ourselves with the belief that the fantastic hegemonic imagination, the motive force behind the cultural production of evil, is a force that sits outside of us, we must answer remembering that we are in a world that we ha…
Sites of Memory
In her essay “The Site of Memory” Toni Morrison explains how her work can be situated within the genre of the memoir. Her essay helps introduce several major themes of this chapter and the book as a whole: imagination, history, the fantastic, the power of images, and memory. She begins her discussion with slave narratives that, she notes, say two things: “This is my historical life—my singular, special example that is personal, but it also repres…
The Womanist Dancing Mind
This quotation is taken from Morrison’s acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1996. As such, Morrison focuses on the dangers, the necessities, and the pleasures of the reading/writing life in the late twentieth century. For her, the dangers are captured in two anecdotes. In one, it is the danger that, in her words, “our busied-up, education-as-horse-race, trophy-driven cul…
Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil
This groundbreaking book provides an analytical tool to understand how and why evil works in the world as it does. Deconstructing memory, history, and myth as received wisdom, the volume critically ex
Presidential Address
In Memoriam
Journal Article In Memoriam: The Power of Testimony: Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928–May 28, 2014) Get access Emilie M. Townes Emilie M. Townes * *Emilie M. Townes, a former President of the American Academy of Religion, is Dean and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt Divinity School. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar…
The Womanist Dancing Mind
Structures
Structures Emilie M. Townes (bio) Perhaps the dilemma Judith points to so well—historically and currently—can best be summed up with what I think of as a truism: Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR) is still a white space because it is a white space, and it is a space that privileges the study of Christian traditions. These totally value-laden assertions are blunt assessments on my part. They are my admission that, for as much time and energy that …
Shadow Boxing the Ridiculous
Primarily, my work has focused on the study of the nature of evil(s). I explore it as an inter-structural phenomenon and its impact on individuals and groups through its dehumanizing effects. In this essay, I use the concepts of the shocking, the outrageous, and the indecent to frame and structure a critique of the academic world’s genuine deficiencies in addressing oppression and the role that we, as ethicists, may play in this. Given the curren…
On Making the Silence Loud
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