Hannah Bacon

Accompanying the ‘moral panic’ about an obesity epidemic is a growth in female body dissatisfaction and dieting. This article maintains that feminist theology must play a vital role in returning the future to fat bodies at a time when the estimated spending on diet products in the US alone equals the projected costs of obesity. The theological nature of this task is essential given the way harmful theological systems and associations remerge within commercial dieting settings to help demonize food, appetite and eating and reestablish ancient associations between women, food and sin. This article develops a feminist theology of food and fat by drawing on the lived experiences of women who diet. Engaging with my own ethnography, I argue that feminist theology must challenge the discourses of sin and salvation which resource the ‘secular’ commercial dieting industry, and instead construct theologies which are ‘good to taste’ and nourishing to our bodies.

Many feminist theologians have creatively engaged in conversations surrounding the Trinity, presenting imaginative models and trinitarian formulations which serve to challenge traditional patriarchal imagery and affirm female personhood in all its diversity. Such feminist contributions are of undeniable value, however this article seeks to take a different approach to the Trinity. Moving beyond the question of how we might adequately speak the Trinity, it turns to address the question of how we might think the triune God. To the extent that the two are related, both will be mentioned in this article, however the focus rests specifically on a dialogue with French feminist and literary theorist, Luce Irigaray, and the ways in which her two concepts of ‘self-love’ and ‘wonder’ might inform a trinitarian understanding of God. Essentially, it is argued that locating these concepts within a specifically trinitarian framework serves to support and affirm the subjectivity of women, establishing the Trinity in contradistinction to a phallocentric logic.