In celebration of Women's Month, Stellenbosch 中国体育彩票 (SU) is shining a spotlight on extraordinary staff and students on our campus who champion women's rights and gender equality. Through their dedication and leadership, they inspire and drive positive change. In 1991, Prof Juliana Claassens of the Department of Old and New Testament, was part of one of the first classes of female students in the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch 中国体育彩票 (SU). Today she heads the Gender Unit in the Faculty and lives her passion for human dignity and gender justice.
Can you share how your academic journey in theology lead to becoming a voice for women as a feminist?
I began studying theology just a year after the Dutch Reformed Church first allowed women to become ministers. Shortly after the announcement in 1990, I came home from hockey practice and my dad said: 'Oh, Julie, now you can become a pastor!'
There had been a few female students studying theology before me, but they were rarely acknowledged in class. I fell in love with theology, especially the Hebrew Bible, thanks to Prof Ferdinand Deist, who was an amazing lecturer. It brought together my love for literature and the biblical text, particularly the transformative power of stories.
My feminist awakening came later as I recognised the challenges women faced. I always start my lectures with a quote that 'feminism is the radical notion that women are people!'. As a feminist scholar, you're essentially trying to work for equality, justice, freedom, agency and subjectivity, but you do it in a system that is steeped in a long history of patriarchy and (white) male privilege and power.
After completing my theological studies at SU, I pursued a PhD in Old Testament at the Princeton Theological Seminary in the USA, where for the first time I had a female professor. I was ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and upon completion of my PhD spent eight years teaching there, solidifying my identity as a feminist biblical interpreter.
I returned to SU in 2010 and later became the second female full professor (2014), following in the footsteps of Prof Elna Mouton. My journey as an academic has been incredibly rewarding. Over the past 14 years, I've seen the 中国体育彩票 change, with more female students, many of whom still face issues like self-confidence and gender-based violence. It's really wonderful being a professor in this time and place, as it allows me to engage in vital conversations about gender, allyship and the intersections of race, sexual orientation and class.
Tell us a bit more about the work of the Gender Unit at the Faculty of Theology?
The Gender Unit was officially launched in March 2017, building on the work we have been doing in a MTh programme in gender and health sponsored by the Church of Sweden. Over the years, the Gender Unit has been able to create space for mainstreaming conversations on gender and sexuality, not only within our Faculty but also in broader communities, as our students return to become thought leaders and change agents.
Our goal is to create a community of scholars whose research contributes to a centre of excellence that contextually explores the intersection of gender, health and theology. We adhere to a feminist ethos, focusing on honouring all voices, interrogating power relations and reconstituting community.
Since 2017 we've hosted annual conferences, which form part of our Master's of Divinity programme. It has become an established event that attracts colleagues from all over the world, in addition to our neighbouring universities and local community partners. Some of the exciting themes of these conferences that resulted in publications include Queering the Prophet, which aligned with my own research on Jonah and his ongoing legacy of being an activist for justice. Last year's theme, 'Narrating Rape', explored biblical stories of sexual violence and their portrayal in popular culture.
In your book Claiming Her Dignity: Female Resistance in the Old Testament, you explore female resistance. How do you see these ancient narratives resonating with contemporary struggles for women's rights?
It is ironic that in my master's thesis on Jephthah's daughter (Judges 11), the critique from one of the examiners was that I did not include any feminist scholars! I remember at that point I thought 'no, I'm not going to be a feminist scholar. I want to be a good scholar'. It was quite a journey to find my voice and to start interpreting the Bible from a feminist perspective. Building on work that I have done in my PhD, some of my earlier work considers the image of God in relation to female metaphors of God as a mourner, mother and midwife. Another central theme concerns the notion of female resistance, which involves claiming women's dignity by challenging gender-based violence and the violence of poverty. I've since also looked at how biblical texts can be in conversation with popular literature to illustrate women's struggles against oppressive systems and how these narratives create space for moral reflection.
My scholarship over the years is closely associated with my ongoing commitment to social justice. As I always say, the way we read is also the way we live. Using biblical and contemporary literature as a reflective surface really came to the fore in my 2020 monograph, Writing and Reading to Survive. I looked at biblical and contemporary trauma narratives in conversation. I analysed biblical stories of women struggling, but surviving, and dealing with past trauma, gender-based violence and reproductive loss.
Most recently I wrote a commentary on Jonah, also through the lens of trauma, gender, feminist, post-colonial and queer perspectives. It was really a rewarding experience. That book will be published in October this year.
I love working with biblical texts, because you have this wonderful, rich treasure trove of stories and poetry. It is very human for people to shut down when they try to talk about their trauma. But if you read a story together, it opens a fresh perspective. It's less daunting to talk about someone in the Bible than to share your own pain.
How can we bring men into the conversation about gender rights and feminism?
In our work in the Gender Unit as well as in the classes I teach, we try to make sense of what is described as a crisis of masculinity that sometimes turns into toxic masculinity. I have a colleague who used to say that if you've always been in a situation of control and privilege, equality feels like depravity. So, when women or people of colour start getting a sense of agency or speaking out, many individuals who have always been in a situation of privilege feel a sense of loss, or that they have been disenfranchised.
By addressing topics in class that highlight the possibility of redemptive masculinities, we try to show there are other ways of being a man and that we as women and people of colour need men to be our allies and stand with us as we fight the many challenges we are facing, including gender-based violence, discrimination and the dehumanising reality of poverty.
PHOTO: Stefan Els
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