Theology and Practice of Claiming Call

Chapter 7 concludes this book by discussing the efficacy of rhetorical strategies in women’s call narratives and includes an evaluation of the different forms featured throughout this work. By claiming their call, and a contested call at that, the women discussed in previous chapters found new ways to exercise their voice and agency to attain ecclesial endorsement. Through a summary of this project’s analysis of women’s rhetoric, the chapter recovers historical narratives of call for contemporary homiletics. By reclaiming rhetorical strategies and tactics, the author offers practical applications for people struggling today, to help them construct their own narrative and provide scripts to claim their call to preach. Further, through different hermeneutical lenses, the author demonstrates how call can be re-interpreted and traditional biblical texts can be re-imagined in preaching sermons. Finally, the chapter brings a renewed focus on the continued debate over women’s ordination and, in effect, calls the question to end the discussion and allow women their rightful place in the pulpit.

Fuck patriarchy! An analysis of digital mainstream media discussion of the #freethenipple activities in Iceland in March 2015

This article contributes to recent research on young women’s emerging feminist movements or feminist counter-publics in the digital age. The focus is on the #freethenipple protests in Iceland in 2015 organised by young women and the ensuing debates in mainstream digital news media and popular ezines. A feminist, post-structuralist perspective is adopted to analyse the discursive context in which the debates and discussions about the protest are embedded, but we are also informed by recent theories about role of affect in triggering and sustaining political movements. The data corpus consists of 60 texts from the digital public domain published during and after the protests. The young women’s political movement is construed as a revolution centring on reclaiming the body from the oppressive structures of patriarchy which, through shame and pornification, have taken their bodies and their ability to choose, in a post-feminist context, from them. Public representations of the protest are mostly supportive and many older feminists are affectively pulled by the young women’s rhetoric about how patriarchy has blighted their lives. We argue that the young women manage to claim space as agents of change but highlight the importance of the support or affective sustenance they received from older feminists.