JULIE CLAGUE

Divine transgressions:
the female Christ-form in art

The (subversive) power of the arts

I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle,
watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to
propitiate the God of Spring.1

Thus Igor Stravinsky articulates his conception of the landmark ballet score
The Rite of Spring. The legendary premie`re in 1913 scandalised Paris: the
subject matter was shocking; Nijinskys unnatural choreography almost
undanceable and the novel dissonance of Stravinskys music with its
strained instrumental range and unsettled and unsettling metre was
considered a blasphemous assault on the musical tradition. The whole
piece communicated power, tension and impending conflict. In ironic
confirmation of the works disturbing character, the audience played its
part. The notorious result was a riot: the orchestra barely audible amid the
jeers.2
As cubist Georges Braque observed: if it is reassurance one seeks, look to
science. Art is meant to disturb.3 The reception of Stravinskys groundbreaking score illustrates the power and immediacy of the arts to move the
emotions but, moreover, the shock of the avant-garde. Indeed, the history of
the arts is perhaps best characterised as a series of creative movements that
have each, in turn, come to prominence as a result of their challenge to
notions of what is acceptable and appropriate, and their rejection of the
conventions, styles and techniques of those they followed. Such subversions
of received traditions can be perilous but also may be, ultimately, beneficial.
Whether or not one enjoys The Rite of Spring as an experience, few can doubt
it represents audacious musical creativity. The meaning of musical form had
been rewritten. The work has therefore made a contribution both at the
emotional and at the intellectual level.

48 Critical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3

The problem of representing Christ in the visual arts

This paper concerns the power of the visual arts and, more specifically, the
controversial nature of certain representations of the Christ figure
humanitys most important sacrificial victim. Throughout history, there
can be few artistic subjects more guaranteed to cause controversy and
scandal than those involving the portrayal of Jesus Christ. The question of
whether and in what way to represent Jesus Christ in the visual arts has
been a vexed one. For, at the centre of Christianity is the extraordinary claim
of the incarnation: the belief that the invisible God took on human flesh to
become the God-man. How can an artist communicate this divine
embodiment in visual form? Is it possible, artistically, adequately to portray
the divine through an image that is so obviously human? It was just such
questions that gave rise to a prolonged and bloody period of Christian
iconoclasm in the eighth and ninth centuries. The fear that religious
iconography might wrongly imply that Jesus was merely human, devoid of
any divine characteristics, prompted the Byzantine emperor Leo III to issue
an edict in 726 ordering the destruction of all religious images in the empire.
It took until the tenth century for this drastic iconoclasm to abate. The
iconoclasts had so focused on and sought to protect the Christian
affirmation of the divinity of Christ that they had overlooked the fact that
Jesuss humanity was as essential to the story of the incarnation as his
divinity. While wholesale iconoclasm is a thing of the past, contemporary
Christianity is no less preoccupied than its earlier varieties with the
question of which portrayals of Christ are appropriate.
However, the contemporary worlds of art and Christianity, within
the wider secular context, offer a much more diverse and ambiguous setting
for appraisals of this question. Unlike previous centuries, there now
exists the related difficulty of identifying just what constitutes religious
art. Art may draw on religious themes and images for other than religious
purposes: for example, to express ideas that pertain more generally to the
human condition and, increasingly, to express anti-religious sentiments,
to parody religion, or merely to provoke or sensationalise. At the same
time, artists may employ secular themes that have the power to inspire
religious reflection. In popular culture there is continued fascination with
the figure of Jesus among believers and non-believers alike, leading to
numerous re-castings often in order to challenge traditional christological
orthodoxies. In this confused and pluralistic climate there is an inevitable
dissolution of the boundaries between previously secure categories such as
the religious and the sacrilegious, the sacred and the profane; and
judgements about which depictions of Christ are appropriate become

Divine transgressions: the female Christ-form in art 49

context-sensitive and subjective, involving artistic, moral and theological
considerations.

The gendered Jesus

The remaining discussion involves a peculiarly postmodern crisis in artistic
representation. Its subject matter defines a quintessential preoccupation of
the century that saw its emergence: that of gender. The artistic world had to
wait for the twentieth century before it could give birth to the (literally
absurd) visual suggestion that Jesus Christ can be represented as female.4
Since the mid-1970s there has been a proliferation of artistic representations
of the female Christ-form in art. In what follows, four artistic portrayals of
the female Christ-form will be examined and discussed. In each case the
female adopts a crucifixion pose in a manner evocative of the cross of
Christ. All have been exhibited in the context of a Christian liturgical
setting, attracting widely differing responses from those who viewed them.

Christa (Figure 1)
The first ever female representation of Christ crucified was the bronze
sculpture Christa created by Edwina Sandys in 1974 for the United Nations
Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace (19761985).5 It
portrays a slumped female nude wearing a crown of thorns with arms
outstretched depicting the cross.6 During Holy Week, on 19 April 1984,
Christa was exhibited at the side of the main altar in the Episcopal Cathedral
of St John the Divine in New York City. The church setting rather than that
of an art gallery politicised peoples reactions to the sculpture and gave
rise to widespread comment.7
The cathedral dean, Reverend James Parks Morton, who was responsible
for organising its display, saw it as an effort to send a positive message to
women.8 He was opposed by New York suffragan bishop Walter D. Dennis,
who urged people to write to the cathedral authorities to complain. In a
Maundy Thursday service Bishop Dennis described the sculpture as
symbolically reprehensible and theologically and historically indefensible.9 According to the New York Times: Bishop Dennis said he did not
object to enhancing symbols of Jesus by casting them in different skin
colors or ethnic characteristics. But he said the statue went too far by
totally changing the symbol.10 Christa remained in the cathedral for
eleven days before being removed due to protests. The sculpture was
subsequently displayed at Stanford Memorial Chapel in California between

50 Critical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3

Figure 1

Christa by Edwina Sandys. Reproduced with permission from Graduate

Theological Union, Berkeley, CA.

October and December 1984. Again the reception was mixed. One visitor
sent a satirical picture of an animal on a cross to the exhibition organisers.11

Crucified Woman (Figure 2)

The bronze Crucified Woman, by the late German-born Canadian sculptor
Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey (d. 1996) portrays a naked young female in
cruciform.12 Although not intended to be specifically religious, it was
displayed in the chancel of Bloor Street United Church, Toronto, during

Divine transgressions: the female Christ-form in art 51

Figure 2

Crucified Woman by Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey. Reproduced with

permission from Emmanuel College, Toronto, Ontario.

Lent and Eastertide 1979 positioned just beneath the cross coinciding
with a Good Friday service on the theme of Battered Wives. The sculpture
received very mixed responses from the congregation and gained widespread press and television coverage in Canada and North America because
of the controversy it caused.13 The minister at Bloor Street, Pastor Clifford
Elliot commented:
The many reactions we received made us aware, as nothing else had, of the
heresies of which we had been guilty in our churchs teaching. When many
people were shocked that a mere human form was placed beneath the cross
because the cross, they said, was the place where Jesus Christ, and He alone,
had hung, we realized that we had denied Jesus essential humanity. We had
become deaf to his calls to all disciples to follow him and take up the cross, not
fall down and worship it. When people were shocked that a woman was
depicted as crucified and concluded that we were implying that Jesus was a
woman, we realized that in our teaching of the incarnation we had implied
that to become human was to become male . . . The shock many felt at the
nakedness of the sculpture showed us that as Christians we had implied, if not
actually taught, that the human body is evil.14

52 Critical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3

The sculptor herself was initially ambivalent about siting the artwork in a
religious context:
I was very hesitant to lend this sculpture to a Toronto church over the week of
Easter 1979, arguing that my message was merely a portrayal of human
suffering. But being asked, Can you see Christ in a Chinese man? Can you see
Christ in a black man? Can you see Christ in a woman? made me change my
view. I was deeply touched by the many women who told me that for the first
time they had felt close to Christ, seeing suffering expressed in a female
body.15

Lutkenhaus-Lackey subsequently offered the work as a gift to Emmanuel

College, Toronto a theological college of the United Church of Canada. In
May 1986, after three years of deliberation by the university authorities, the
gift was formally installed in the grounds of the college.16 In its university
setting, further symbolic associations were destined to become attached to
Crucified Woman. On 6 December 1989 at the Ecole Polytechnique in
Montreal after ordering the male members of an engineering class to leave
Marc Lepine, who had been refused admission to the faculty to study
engineering, opened fire on the remaining females. He gunned down
twenty-seven women in various parts of the building, killing fourteen
before turning the gun on himself.17 Lutkenhaus-Lackeys Crucified Woman
became an instant focus for and shrine to the memory of the Montreal
victims as hundreds gathered to be at the statue.18 Every year for a decade,
on 6 December, a memorial service was held in Emmanuel College
alongside the sculpture.19 As a result, Crucified Woman is now automatically
associated with the massacre the worst in Canadian history and has
come to symbolise it.

Christine on the Cross (Figure 3)

The graphic and disturbing sculpture Christine on the Cross, by James M.
Murphy, was exhibited at James Memorial Chapel, Union Theological
Seminary, New York City during Eastertide 1984 at the same time that
Sandys Christa was displayed at the Episcopal Cathedral.20 It portrays an
inverted wooden cross with female figure positioned in such a way that her
legs are spread-eagled and her feet nailed to the arms of the cross while her
hands are nailed together above her head to the vertical.21
It was the sculptures symbolisation of female suffering that prompted
biblical scholar Phyllis Trible, then Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature at
Union Theological Seminary, to approach Murphy to use Christine on the
Cross as part of the Easter Week services in 1984. The sculpture would

Divine transgressions: the female Christ-form in art 53

Figure 3

Christine on the Cross by James M. Murphy. Reproduced with permission

from James M. Murphy.

provide a focus for the worship in conjunction with Tribles recently

published book Texts of Terror, which deals with the biblical representation
of the suffering and abuse of four Old Testament female characters: Hagar;
Tamar; the daughter of Jephthah; and the unnamed victim of rape, murder
and mutilation in Judges 19.22 The horror of the biblical narratives was
brought vividly to life by the visual aid of the sculpture.
The artist, who describes himself as a Christian feminist, is an ordained
United Church of Christ minister and psychiatrist working in New York City,
and he produced the sculpture within the context of spiritual reflection:
Every Easter for about five years I attempted to sculpt a crucifixion but did not
complete it. Last Easter my sketch in soft clay took the shape of a woman.
I realised thereby that the worlds rejection and hatred of women culminates

54 Critical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3

in crucifying the female Christ . . . I thought that the crucifixion of a woman
would be accurately expressed by spreading her legs, not her arms, on a
lowered cross-bar. Such a posture symbolizes hostility toward woman, with
implications of submission, sexual humiliation and rape.23

Bosnian Christa (Figure 4)

Margaret Argyles Bosnian Christa was used as a centrepiece in the Coming
Out of the Shadows: Women Against Violence ecumenical service
celebrating the mid-point of the World Council of Churches Decade for
Churches in Solidarity with Women (198898), held at the Anglican
Cathedral in Manchester, England, on 24 October 1993.24 Later, in
November, reports of the use of the image of a female on a cross made

Figure 4

Bosnian Christa by Margaret Argyle. Reproduced with permission from

Margaret Argyle.

Divine transgressions: the female Christ-form in art 55

national news amid accusations of blasphemy with headlines such as
Almighty row as God has a sex change.25
Bosnian Christa, like Christine on the Cross, was also created within the
context of a religious meditation. In this case, as a personal Lenten reflection
on the plight of the women who were raped and forcibly impregnated in
the former Yugoslavia in 1993.26 Speaking about the creation of her work,
Argyle stated:
Each year during Lent I make something as an aid to my thinking around the
theme of Easter. I had been very disturbed throughout the Spring of 1993 by
the accounts in the press of the rapes carried out on Bosnian women. I could
not find a way of expressing my feelings or of dealing with the questions these
atrocities raised . . . the idea came to me that my Easter piece this year would
be a Christa which would address the Bosnian womens situation a Christa
which would speak about the obscenity of rape clearly and graphically. I
didnt want to do it. I knew it would feature a vulva and a crucified figure of a
woman . . . My feelings about rape which I found impossible to verbalize
found their own expression in stitch. I did not make the piece from any
previous theological thinking or reflection all that came afterwards!27

Despite the disturbing subject matter and explicit sexual imagery of Bosnian
Christa, the impact of the work is restful rather than aggressive. A deep
black wool backdrop is slit in its centre to reveal a blood-red opening
framed by dark red crushed velvet curtain-like lips. Standing within the
opening of the vulva is an elongated cross bearing a slim, stylised naked
female. It took the creation of Bosnian Christa to revivify, for Argyle, the
symbolic power of the cross of Christ:
Previously I had not been able to use the cross in my work at all because I had
thought it was a terribly overused symbol which had become almost
meaningless to me . . . But the cross now has a meaning for me. Its about a
God who is in the world and present wherever anyone suffers. That was an
enormous revelation for me. I had never associated God with women and
their suffering before . . .28

How do the images function theologically?

Human thought has deciphering modes, hermeneutical vocations trying to
locate the different hidden meanings of those structures of signification which
Ricoeur calls symbols. This is a hermeneutical task, and a work of
interpretation which symbols demand from us, by unfolding several levels
of superimposed meanings which, like peeling an onion, always directs us to
another hidden meaning we have not seen before. Jesus Christs true life is
hidden in the historical theological interpretation narratives. Its meaning can

56 Critical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3

only be peeled off in our creative religious imagination . . . there is more
possibility to produce an efficacious Christology with our creative imagination, nurtured by our own historical experiences, than by just following thirty
something years of his life which have been reduced to less than thirty
something minutes of reading in the Gospels.29

What process occurs when one is confronted with these images, and what, if
any, theological lessons are there to be learned from the experience? The
viewer observes, engages with the image and responds perhaps positively,
perhaps negatively. The response is emotional, aesthetic and intellectual.
The first encounter may be one of shock, as the device of unconventionality
subverts the viewers expectations. But the image is not wholly unfamiliar
as it bears sufficient resemblance to and invites identification with the
image of the crucified Christ. Nevertheless, the image does not overturn
what we know factually. It is not saying that Jesus was a woman. The image
is not to be taken literally. There is a more complex metaphorical association
at work between the new image of the female-Christ and the more familiar
male image of Christ.30
Like a metaphor in literature, we are presented with both a comparison
and simultaneously a contrast, creating a frisson of experience as the two
associations jostle for the viewers attention. In terms of comparison we see
a recognisable resemblance implied between the image of the crucified
female and the more familiar image (that the viewer imaginatively
interposes) of the crucified Christ. And each illuminates the other.
Association with the historical cross of Jesus is inevitable, and with all
that the central symbol of the Christian faith has come to stand for. As
theorists of metaphor would say, it is as though the Christa image acts as a
vehicle carrying, by association, the image of the Christ figure that lay
implicit within it as a latent possibility. As viewers we are invited to
participate in the artists intentions, and to speculate on the ways that the
comparison might be apt, by way of establishing consonances and making
connections between the two reciprocal images.
However, despite similarity, there is an immediate ambiguity and
paradoxical opposition established between the Christa figure and what
she is being contrasted with. We are confronted by incongruity; the original
meaning placed under strain by the suggestion of femaleness where once
there was maleness. The result is a curious tension caused by the subversion
of the familiar symbol and what it stands for. The traditional symbol and
the new image are locked in a conflict of difference causing religious
turbulence and prompting the viewer to make a speedy evaluation: is this
image intended as an insult, a parody, a blasphemy? Is it religious,
reverential, meaningful?

Divine transgressions: the female Christ-form in art 57

The complex composite message traditionally communicated by the
familiar Christian image of the cross has been disrupted. But what does the
cross of Christ stand for? What does it represent? What message has that
broken body of Christ communicated to subsequent Christians down the
ages? The answer is that the cross is a polyvalent sign offering multiple
theological possibilities. A wealth of theological terminology has been
developed seeking to explain the event: sacrifice, expiation, reconciliation,
propitiation, justification, salvation, atonement, and so on. There is no one
satisfactory meaning that can encapsulate and make sense of Jesuss passion
and crucifixion; and artists have exploited this richness of symbolism and
breadth of meaning in their creative work of communicating the
significance for humanity of Jesuss crucified body: Christus victor, Christus
victima and so on.
The mixed messages we receive on encountering the female-Christ
figure interact in a shifting semantic process through which new meanings
are made possible. The identification with combined with the distanciation from the traditional symbol creates an interplay of ideas and presents
an opportunity for a theological mind-game of association. Such an image
functions as an heuristic tool enabling theological reflection to take place,
challenging viewers to reflect anew on their received notions of incarnation,
redemption and salvation. Female representations of the crucified Christ are
pregnant with theological possibility, enabling us to see what is cruciform in
pluriform. At the same time, the Christian cross rendered virtually
invisible by its ubiquity and exhaustion as a symbol is given a new
potentiality through its female face-lift and thereby revitalised for use in a
contemporary religious context.

The significance of gender to the symbolic order

Crossing the boundary of gender, from the familiar male figure of Christ to
that of a female figure appears to affect the symbolism in a profound and
transgressive way. The scandal of particularity appears to be at its most
scandalous in relation to the gender of Jesus, whereas his social status, his
ethnic and even his religious identity are to be considered rather more
incidental. The degree of ontological investment in the maleness of Jesus is
apparent in the specious argument employed by the Vatican in part
justification of why women must be excluded from ordination to the
ministerial priesthood: that, since Jesus was male, women are unable to
image Christ through priestly function.31 Thus, the gender of Jesus has
become highly politicised, with Catholics who criticise such blatant sexism
becoming subject to ecclesiastical censure.

58 Critical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3

The visual image of a crucified female-Christ offers a startling if limited
antidote to Christian patriarchy. It does so, not solely by a transposition of
gender from male to female but also by an injection of naked female
sexuality into a symbol system in which the female body has been
conceived of traditionally as an obstacle to the divine. The power and
source of threat in these images is precisely the fact that female sexuality is
exposed, laid bare for all to see. This contrasts with other female icons the
Virgin Mary being the most obvious to the extent that the image is totally
non-threatening: a mother-figure devoid of sexual potency. The overt
sexualised humanity of the crucified female disturbs critics who (like the
iconoclasts of old) see it as indecent and offensive to the divinity of Christ.
What critics want to see is a cover-up.
Perhaps there is a reason why the sexuality of the female-Christ is more
apparent than in conventional depictions of Christ. In the viewers gaze the
female sexuality is augmented precisely because Jesus has been systematically stripped of his sexuality throughout Christian art history. A lifetime
of seeing his male form on the cross has inoculated us against its sexual
impact. The male Jesus on the cross is gendered but not sexual, because the
viewer has unwittingly castrated the Christ. The result is a decent,
disembodied theology of which no one can be ashamed.
There is yet more to be said about the symbolic value inherent in the
gender of the crucified Christ. Jesuss passive acceptance of his death on the
cross can be read as a deliberate transgression of gender expectations. The
one described by Luce Irigaray as that most female of men the Son,32 in an
abnegation of conventional notions of masculinity, can be seen to resist and
reject the masculinist paradigm of power, domination and aggression that is
represented in Freudian terms by the phallic symbol. In the words of
Catholic feminist theologian Tina Beattie: The cross signifies the vengeance
of the big, hard Phallus on this gentle and vulnerable God.33 By suffering
under the worst excesses of patriarchy, Jesus subverts the patriarchal order
and offers an alternative way of being in the world. The phallic symbol of
masculinity is thereby overturned in what biblical critic Stephen Moore
terms Christs consummately feminine performance on the cross.34 Is it
not the case that the female-Christ can symbolise the same?

The representation of female suffering

But stop. What medicine are women being offered here: the sight of one
more female in an agony of suffering? Does the crucified Christa image not
reinforce the image of woman as perpetual victim? Can such an image
counteract the poisonous misogynistic theologising that has killed the faith

Divine transgressions: the female Christ-form in art 59

of so many Christian women? In a world where, according to World Health
Organisation estimates, one in four women will suffer physical and/or
sexual abuse in their lifetime, the questions surrounding the appropriateness of such works of art take on an ethical as well as theological
dimension.35
The objection is an important one, a fortiori because females often suffer
at the hands of men because of their bodies, and because, historically,
institutional Christianity itself has contributed to the suffering of women.
Furthermore, the theology of suffering is deeply ambivalent with its
masochistic and psychologically damaging ideal of turning the other
cheek and patient endurance of pain and evil (even when its cause is
injustice), and women have been particularly ill-served by it not least
because of the patriarchal demand that women should fit uncomplainingly
into their prescribed and limited social and familial roles. Given these
objections, perhaps women should seek their salvation elsewhere.
Yet, despite these acknowledged difficulties, women (and men) have
found images of the crucified Christa precisely as a response to the
oppression of and violence against women to be beneficial. Of course,
there has always been identification by the persecuted Christian with the
crucified Christ. However, it is not just that women can see their own
suffering in the Christa image but that they also find contained within it the
possibility of healing. It is for this reason that Christian feminist Susan
Thistlethwaite altered her evaluation of the Christa:
When I first saw Edwina Sandyss sculpture Christa in the Cathedral of St.
John the Divine in New York City, I was unsettled and disliked it intensely.
The figure is of an unclothed woman crowned with thorns, arms outstretched
in the form of a crucifix but without a cross behind it. I said to my companion,
Women are routinely crucified in contemporary society. This will tend to
legitimate violence against them. Yet since then, because of the healing these
statues tend to evoke in women who have survived sexual and domestic
violence, I have revised my view. Christa is not experienced by many women
as legitimating violence against them but as identifying with their pain and
freeing them from the guilt that somehow, because of the original sin of being
female, they deserved what they got.36

The forces of evil were triumphant when Christ died on Calvary, just as they
were triumphant in Montreal and Bosnia and the countless other places
where women qua women have suffered violence and injustice. There is
nothing to be salvaged. Nevertheless, the artistic images that draw on these
historical events offer, through their symbolic potency, something other
than utter abjection. Representations of the Christa do not remove the

60 Critical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3

unanswered theological difficulties associated with divine suffering, the
problem of evil and the mystery of salvation. Whatever the theological
claims made about the significance of the crucifixion, the fact is that many
are moved by the association of female suffering with the one who has come
to symbolise the suffering of all humanity: the Christ.

Conclusion
. . . where there is no law there is no transgression.
St Pauls Epistle to the Romans, 4:15

The Christian cross has had Jesus hanging on it for so long that people have
become numb to its horror and significance. The naked female Christa
image has stripped back the cross to its bare essentials: that of a stark
execution scene, and removed the accretions of years of theology. The
graphic portrayal of female suffering powerfully exposes the reality of
the cross as a site of patriarchal violence. Through the shock of the female
image, the symbolic power of the crucifix is reawakened as the reality of the
original event bites. The depiction of a female Christ crucified challenges
theological orthodoxies and upsets the gender symbolism ingrained upon
the Christian cross. As such, the image of a female-Christ figure can form a
tactic in a broader feminist strategy of representation (including the device
of calling God Mother) employed by women who have found themselves
bound and gagged by Christian tradition with no means of authentic
expression. No one disputes that (as with all human representations of the
divine) such a strategy is of limited value to the extent that it cannot carry
the total weight of meanings that the word God or the symbol of the cross
demand. However, its appeal lies in the potential to act as an antidote to the
male stands for all humanity assumption that continues to infect
androcentric theology.
Art cannot do all theologys work, but the creativity of the artist can like
jump leads shock the viewer into beginning a journey into the unknown
associations, connections and meanings that are opened up in the uncharted
resources of the human imagination.

Notes
1 Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (19031934) (London: Marion Boyars, 1990),
31; first published as Chroniques de ma vie (Paris, 1935).

Divine transgressions: the female Christ-form in art 61

2 For a discussion of the conception and reception of the ballet, see Peter Hill,
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
3 Georges Braque, Georges Braque. Le jour et la nuit: cahiers 19171952 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1988), 42.
4 Nevertheless as the work of scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum, Joan
Gibson and Barbara Newman has shown female imagery was employed in
medieval writing about Christ and the Holy Spirit, and there was considerable
theological speculation on whether Jesus could have been born a woman. Cf.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus As Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High
Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), and . . . And
Woman His Humanity: Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later
Middle Ages, in Caroline Walker Bynum, Stenan Harrel and Paula Richman
(eds), Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press,
1984), 25788, repr. in C. W. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on
Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992);
Joan Gibson, Could Christ Have Been Born a Woman?: A Medieval Debate,
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 8:1 (Spring 1992), 6582; Barbara Newman,
From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 182223.
5 Edwina Sandys, Christa, bronze sculpture (5400
4000
800 ), 1974.
6 An image of this sculpture can be viewed on Sandys website at http://
www.edwinasandys.com/sculpture/scultureChrista.html.
7 Cf. Kenneth A. Briggs, Cathedral Removing Statue of Crucified Woman, New
York Times, 28 April 1984; anon., Vexing Christa, Time Magazine, 7 May 1984, 94;
Michael J. Farrell, Christa: Woman Climbs on the Cross to Challenge
Christianitys Male Dominance, National Catholic Reporter, 5 April 1985, 11
12; Reflections on the Christa, Special Issue of Journal of Women and Religion, 4:2
(Winter 1985); Brian Wren, What Language Shall I Borrow? God-talk in Worship: A
Male Response to Feminist Theology (London: SCM, 1989), 1712. For a German
discussion, see Silvia Strahm Bernet, Jesa Christa, in Doris Strahm and Regula
Strobel (eds), Vom Verlangen nach Heilwerden: Christologie in feministischtheologischer Sicht (Fribourg/Luzern: Edition Exodus, 1991), 17281.
8 Anon., Vexing Christa, 94.
9 Reported in Briggs, Cathedral Removing Statue of Crucified Woman.
10 Briggs, Cathedral Removing Statue of Crucified Woman.
11 Cf. Mary Cross, Introduction from the Publisher, in Reflections on the
Christa, Special Issue of Journal of Women and Religion, 4:2 (Winter 1985), 35
(pp. 34).
12 Almuth Lutkenhaus-Lackey, Crucified Woman, bronze sculpture (height 8 ft),
1976.
13 For an account of the public reactions to the Bloor Street episode, see Doris Jean
Dyke, Crucified Woman (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1991); Doris
Jean Dyke, Crucified Woman: Art and the Experience of Faith, Toronto Journal
of Theology, 5:2 (1989), 1619, and Clifford Elliott, Crucified Woman

62 Critical Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3

14
15
16
17

18
19
20
21
22
23
24

25

26

27
28

[a sculpture], International Review of Mission, 71 (July 1982), 3325. Most

responses focused on the theme of suffering.
Elliott, Crucified Woman [a sculpture], 334.
Cited in Bobbie Crawford, A Female Crucifix?, Daughters of Sarah, 14:6
(NovemberDecember 1988), 247 (p. 26). Cf. Dyke, Crucified Woman, 3.
Cf. Christopher Hume, Peaceful Setting Lends Air of Serenity to Sculpture of
Crucified Woman, Toronto Star, 6 June 1986.
For further details of the Montreal Massacre, see Barry Came et al., Montreal
Massacre: Railing Against Feminists, Macleans Magazine, 18 December 1989,
http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/dec6/macleans.html (accessed 22 June
2005).
Cf. Dyke, Crucified Woman, 678.
Kelly Holloway, Montreal Massacre Service to be Dropped, University of
Toronto Varsity News, 24 July 2001.
This is referred to in Briggs, Cathedral Removing Statue of Crucified Woman.
James M. Murphy, Christine on the Cross, Clay sculpture (height 2400 ),
1984.
Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives,
Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1984.
Cited in Crawford, A Female Crucifix?, 27.
Margaret Argyle, Bosnian Christa, mixed textile panel (4800
2900 ), 1993. For an
account of the liturgy and a discussion of the responses it elicited, see Steve
Nolan, Worshipping (Wo)men, Liturgical Representation and Feminist Film
Theory: An Alien/s Identification, in Grace M. Jantzen (guest ed.), Representation, Gender and Experience, Special Issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands
University Library of Manchester, 80:3 (Autumn 1998), 195213.
Manchester Evening News, 23 November 1993. The story broke on BBC Radio 4
Six OClock News, 22 November 1993. Newspaper reports subsequently
followed: Feminists Spark Cathedral Storm, Daily Telegraph, 23 November
1993; Christa stirs Manchester Ire, Catholic Herald, 25 November 1993; Betty
Saunders, Feminist Triumphalism Detected, Church Times, 26 November
1993; Feminist Rite Prompts Calls of Blasphemy , Church of England
Newspaper, 26 November 1993; The Baptist behind the Bosnian Christa, Baptist
Times, 16 December 1993. This gave rise to correspondence in the letters pages of
the religious weeklies. Cf. Letters to the Editor, Church Times, 3 and 10
December 1993; Feedback, Baptist Times, 13 January 1994.
For Argyles reflections on the creation of Bosnian Christa and its theological
significance, see Margaret Argyle, Bosnian Christa, Cutting Edge: The
Theological Journal of Sheffield Chaplaincy for Higher Education, 11 March 1995,
510; Julie Clague, Interview with Margaret Argyle, Feminist Theology, 10
(September 1995), 5768.
Clague, Interview with Margaret Argyle, 5860.
In Clague, Interview with Margaret Argyle, 667.

Divine transgressions: the female Christ-form in art 63

29 Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender
and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 118.
30 Although the term metaphor is most commonly applied as a figure of speech,
it is now commonplace to apply the term to the visual arts. Cf. Michael Polyani
and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Carl
R. Hausman, Metaphor and Art: Interactionism and Reference in the Verbal and
Nonverbal Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a
theological application of the concept to the arts, see Jeremy Begbie, Voicing
Creations Praise: Towards a Theology of the Arts (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991);
Aidan Nichols, The Art of God Incarnate: Theology and Image in Christian Tradition
(London: DLT, 1980).
31 Roman Catholic Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Inter
Insigniores Declaration on the question of admission of women to the
ministerial priesthood, 1976, n. 5 (Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 69 (1977), 98116). It
states: there would not be this natural resemblance which must exist between
Christ and his minister if the role of Christ were not taken by a man: in such a
case it would be difficult to see in the minister the image of Christ. For Christ
himself was and remains a man.
32 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 199, first published as Speculum de lautre femme
(Les Editions de Minuit, 1974).
33 Tina Beattie, Sexuality and the Resurrection of the Body: Reflections in a Hall of
Mirrors, in Gavin DCosta (ed.), Resurrection Reconsidered (Oxford: Oneworld,
1996), 13549 (p. 142).
34 Stephen D. Moore, Gods Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and around the
Bible (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 158.
35 World Health Organization, Violence Against Women, Fact Sheet No. 239 (June
2000), http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs239/en/ (accessed 22
June 2005).
36 Susan Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race, and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White
(New York: Crossroad, 1989), 93.