Issue 7 Sneak Peak: The Final Resting Place of Self
A New Look at Autonomy, Dependency, and Power
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Please enjoy a sneak peak of this Issue 7 essay by Kristen Blair, where she explores the spiritual impact of false notions of the independent self, and proposes a truer model of being. Read the whole essay and receive your own print copy of this special issue by becoming a print subscriber today for 20% off.
Araminta “Minty” Ross Tubman was twenty-two when she fled her enslavers in the dark of the night, taking the name Harriet after her mother. Harriet Tubman escaped, and then went back. In total, Tubman would return to the South thirteen times, leading groups of enslaved peoples escaping through the legendary “underground railroad.” Tubman, nicknamed “Moses,” was the most successful and famous conductor of the so-called underground railroad, which was a network of individuals working secretly and at great risk to conduct enslaved peoples across the South to the Northern United States, Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean. But who was escaping? Scholar David Blight notes that “Eighty percent of these fugitives were young males in their teens and twenties who generally absconded alone. . . . Young slave women were much less likely to run away because of their family and child-rearing responsibilities.”1 Infants were occasionally smuggled along the way to freedom; Tubman reportedly carried babies “drugged with paregoric in a basket on her arm.”2 Older children would have been much more difficult, if not impossible.
Fleeing situations of violence and oppression is significantly more complex for those with children. Children cannot understand the need for silence, long periods of waiting, or constant hunger with no end in sight. Infants in the arms of women fleeing Nazi Germany were often drugged to ensure their quiet on boats, sometimes never to wake again.3 In Gaza, women have delivered babies amid falling bullets, unable to move while in active labor. People in dire circumstances, particularly women, have to make unthinkable decisions, sometimes leaving children behind to uncertain fates.
Dependent relationships, including mother-child relationships, house enormous vulnerabilities. The binds that tie mothers to children are powerful; biology has meticulously evolved this way. Infants, especially fragile human infants who are born before they are mobile because of the size of a female human’s pelvis, would die without the necessary and exhausting care provided by bonds of love and obligation. The writers of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew paint the peril of the end times: “But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land, and wrath upon this people” (Luke 21:23, KJV; see Matthew 24:19). The image of pregnant women unable to run quickly enough to escape disaster, of mothers with infants in their arms or children at their feet trying to make their way to safety, is a miserable one, made more so by its continual enactment throughout history and into the present. Women and children, particularly in the Hebrew Bible, are often placed in the category of those who are needy and vulnerable, requiring hospitality and care. The religious devotee is repeatedly instructed to look after the widows and orphans.4 Men, by contrast, are typically addressed as the devotees who are doing the looking-after.
This distinction between dependency and independence, or between vulnerability and strength, is a binary that wields enormous power. It comes to define hierarchies of dominance and submission, where those in power wield control over the vulnerable other. Interestingly, the “vulnerable other” in many contexts throughout history has been, broadly, women, children, and the enslaved, and those in power have been, by default, free men. This is one loose definition of patriarchy, explained by some as a system where men as a class dominate or control social, political, religious, and private institutions. One form of patriarchy, termed “benevolent patriarchy,” presumes that women require protection and care by nature, making systems of male control necessary and ultimately helpful or benevolent. As the “weaker” or “fairer” sex, women in this logic are in need of paternal care; they are naturally dependent, naturally vulnerable. Social hierarchies have relied on such ideas to peddle a powerful myth linking power with independence.
In distant days, this myth found its apex in the form of monarchs: at the highest levels of power, prestige, and influence sits an autonomous being with sole power to control and dictate. But even after bloody revolutions and quests for democracy, this myth did not die. In Western societies, Enlightenment ideals perpetuated this myth in the form of reason, logic, and the pursuit of objective truth. Independence, the individual pursuit of meaning and truth, is the path to freedom. The person unencumbered by attachments or vulnerabilities can pursue adventure, make scientific discoveries, and calculate eternal truth. The person unencumbered by attachments or vulnerabilities can be, in short, sovereign.
Detached from birth-right monarchy and linked with democratic ideals, sovereignty begins to seem like the ultimate goal for human achievement. The sovereign being becomes the brave adventurer—a person brave enough to chase their dreams without being held back by self-sacrificing labor. The problem is that a lot of self-sacrificing labor is essential for human survival and happiness, and most of that labor is done by women. What I want to suggest throughout this essay is that an investigation of spiritual sovereignty for women cannot escape the messiness of questions about dependency, autonomy, and vulnerability. Ultimately, I think we need to dispel myths that confuse spiritual sovereignty with dominating and individualistic power.
The word sovereignty comes from the French souverainete, which has its roots in the Latin word superānus (meaning “above,” “chief,” or “ruler”). In its etymological history, the word signified supreme power or being above others, denoting in English ultimate authority or independence. A sovereign was, obviously, a monarch or chief. But to be sovereign, an idea that continued even in politically democratic contexts, meant to be powerful, superior, supreme, chief, and autonomous. The supreme being, the sovereign, is independent, autonomous, and protected from preventable vulnerabilities. The sovereign being is unattached, or at least their attachments do not impede them.
To be sovereign—“having the highest power or being completely independent,” as another dictionary puts it—one cannot have significant attachments. One cannot appear weak or compromised or vulnerable to attack. Poet Fred Joiner reminds that sovereignty “can be fragile, easy / to fade or be erased, all / It takes is a single heavy hand.”5 Sovereign nations exist alongside concepts like empire, ownership, control, “a people’s history / Crumbling in another’s wake.” Sovereignty has often, even usually, been defined in relation to power, the consolidation of power, and the mechanisms of control which ensure its continuation. A sovereign (queen, king, nation) has power over its subjects or those it deems other or inferior (or, importantly, not sovereign6). Political philosophers talk about different types and characteristics of sovereignty, including how a ruling power can exact obedience and compliance with the stated rule of law.
The question, then, is who can be sovereign. Limited by the foregoing definition as we are to independence, protection from vulnerability, and unattached power, it is not difficult to understand why the majority of sovereign figures throughout history have been male, and why the status of sovereignty has been stripped from peoples whose customs suggest difference from those in power. Concepts of sovereignty as it has usually been defined have generally assumed systems of patriarchy as the human norm. Even if these models do not explicitly exclude women, their emphasis on independence and autonomy devalues dependent, vulnerable relationships and makes the pursuit of power and dominance seem like the highest good.
And here’s where things get especially dicey: sovereignty as a political and social concept is woven in seemingly inextricable ways with sovereignty as a theological concept. Sovereignty in a Christian theological sense concerns the idea of a single ruling power: a sovereign God. Unfortunately, this concept has become imbued with the patriarchal assumptions which have colored notions of sovereignty. For much of Christian history, notions of God’s sovereignty have been intertwined with notions of secular sovereignty:7 This God endorses empire, grants power to monarchs, consolidates power among the wealthy. Even without the corruption of imperial power, the sovereign God who ostensibly backed the Christian empire was not, could not be, a God of attachments. The sovereign, omnipotent God could not be vulnerable. Sovereignty, theological and secular, has thus been intertwined with the mythic ideal of autonomy, independence, and control.
But the first problem is that the binaries which uphold these ideas about sovereignty are myths. They hold no water.
The second problem is that myths can come to life.
The myth of autonomy, independence, and invulnerability? It sounds amazing. Imagine being all powerful, self-sufficient, responsible to or for no one, completely free to pursue any and all interests, unimpeded by anything but the sound of your own voice. But what would make this possible in reality? For me to realize, for example, some definitions of independence, I would need (for starters):
Reliable, qualified people to care for my children full time
People to cook all of my meals and clean my house
Economic independence and income which fully supports my goals and pursuits
Complete financial security and someone to handle all of my economic affairs
Consistent transportation that gets me wherever I need to be when I need to be there
Of course, even writing this list is somewhat laughable because it immediately illuminates all sorts of dependencies: I am dependent on people to care for my children. I am dependent on farmers to provide the food that I eat. I am dependent on the earth to provide the food that farmers harvest. I am dependent on my city to pave roads and provide reliable transportation. I am dependent on an employer to write my paychecks so I can heat my house in the winter. And the deeper I go, the more dependency I find. I am dependent on my ancestors to care for the earth so that the planet I inhabit supports life. I am dependent on the sun, the moon, the ocean tides, the trees. I am dependent on oxygen, and on my own beating heart, and on shoes when I step outside, and on a thousand additional things within and beyond the scope of my comprehension. Is it possible to truly provide for myself, dependent on no one and nothing? Is this the meaning of freedom?
I think the answer to this question is obviously no. We are all dependent. The web of life binds us all. But the myth of independence as freedom continues to hold enormous sway and traction along gendered lines because some people seem to be less attached (dependent) than others.
To take just one famous example, the paragon of the self-made scientist, Charles Darwin had:
A wife and servants to care for his children full time
A wife and servants to cook his meals, clean his house, and help him remember and keep social obligations
Inherited wealth that enabled him to pursue his scientific interests
A wife and servants who arranged transportation so he could pursue his interests with no domestic duty standing in the way8
Theologian Catherine Keller suggests that this model of sovereign independence is the meat behind a particular vision of selfhood, one she calls a separatist self. Western culture in particular has modeled an idea of an individual who is unattached. It is this autonomous being—separate from the messiness and vulnerability of dependent relationships—who can achieve power, independence, and full selfhood.9
But the separatist self actually has quite a bit of invisible, essential labor enabling its existence. Behind Darwin’s capacity for independence were a host of people who created the conditions for him to explore, unencumbered by demands of vulnerability. According to Keller, whole groups of people have been defined by this sort of invisible labor, labor which allows separatist selfhood to exist, to the extent that their entire self-concept is realized in it. She calls this soluble selfhood. This soluble self dissolves into another, functionally enabling their myth of separation to continue, typically in male/female or servant/master relationships.
But if it seems like justice would be for the soluble self to become, in turn, the separative self10 (for Emma Darwin, for example, to take the place of her husband), we are again confounded: both solubility and separatism are facades. They are two sides of one coin; they both need each other to exist. In other words, without solubility, separatism emerges disheveled and floundering, unable to keep up the act. Without separatism, solubility has no purpose, no mythos to sustain.
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