interview

WIE: In this issue of our magazine, we're exploring gender identity in relationship to spiritual realization or enlightenment. We're speaking with a number of people who have very different perspectives on this subject, and we were very eager to speak with you because you are one of the most radical and outspoken feminists alive today as well as a visionary theologian.

MARY DALY: Well, I would never create a magazine or a journal with that as a subject. It feels foreign. And I'm not trying to put you down, but what makes me feel alien from it is that it's so much in the patriarchal mode. Even to talk about "gender identity"—what the hell is that?

WIE: That's what we're interested in finding out.

MD: You see, I don't care. It really doesn't interest me much. I am a woman. I know that. No one's going to disabuse me of that.

WIE: What is your concept of spiritual liberation?

MD: It's not an expression I ever use.

WIE: Another way to approach this would be to speak about spiritual aspiration.

MD: Radical feminists who talk to me ask me questions in my language. You're asking: "What is your concept of . . . ?" Well, I don't have a concept of that because I'm not one of you. There was a point a few years ago when I stopped using the word "spiritual."

WIE: Why is that?

MD: Because it sounds too much like dichotomizing mind/body. And, in fact, when I do speak of spirit and matter, I often hyphenate it: "spirit-matter," for the reason that I don't like to dichotomize. I think matter is extremely alive and spiritual in the deepest sense. And so "spiritual" usually just doesn't do because it seems to carry with it that baggage of dichotomizing. So whenever possible I use the word "elemental." By "elemental" I mean a lot of things; the four elements: earth, air, fire, water—but also the ether. And in ancient Greek philosophy the primal sounds of the alphabet were called elemental, and angels were elementals. And the universe, the earth, stars, other planets and the suns were also called elements, or "stoicheia." It's something vast. My work follows in that tradition of bonding—recognizing and realizing, meaning also actualizing, our connection with the universe. So, the word I commonly use for the ultimate reality—I won't say "God," that's dead—is "the universe.I'll say "spirit," but meaning a principle of life within all being, including rocks. And I have used capital "B," Be-ing, to represent the verb God.

WIE: Can you explain that a bit further?

MD: A thousand years ago, when I was studying standard scholastic philosophy, God was called the "supreme being." And that made him a noun and something on high. Hierarchical. Yahweh. The hairy claw coming down. And that obviously is unsatisfactory. It always has images hanging around that are undesirable. Then I realized, with the help of a friend of mine, Nelle Morton, that "being" is a verb, and it should be hyphenated [be-ing]. When you do that, everything changes. I would also say that the universe is a verb. There are other ways of describing this ultimate/intimate reality. It's a mode of existence in which we profoundly realize and actualize our connectedness in multiple ways. It's Be-ing, capital "B," but understood as luminous, joyous, what Aristotle called the harmony of the spheres; representing an aspect of integrity, integrity beyond integrity. I think it's beyond spiritual. I mean, my cat wouldn't be concerned with "spiritual liberation"; she's all spirit, she's absolutely in-spirited. I used to talk about the women's movement in the seventies as a "spiritual revolution," and that's better than "liberation" to me. But then I got over that too and moved on.

WIE: It sounds like the vision you're describing is a sensitivity to and a connectedness with the life force or presence in everything, animate and inanimate.

MD: Yes, and it's a recognition of our connection with the entire universe—microcosm and macrocosm. We don't necessarily have to know everything that's out there—that isn't the point—but it's a sense of striving for connectedness and a joy in that. I look at the sunset here, or experiences of nature, aesthetic experiences, and experiences of creativity and of the power of fighting, overcoming fear.

WIE: Do you believe that there are differences between men's and women's capacities to realize and embrace what you've just been speaking about?

MD: Okay . . . I could give you some sort of answer, but it's not the kind of question that intrigues me because I don't think about men. I really don't care about them. I'm concerned with women's capacities, which have been infinitely diminished under patriarchy. Not that they've disappeared, but they've been made subliminal. I'm concerned with women enlarging our capacities, actualizing them. So that takes all my energy. I'm not interested in the differences between women and men. I really am totally uninterested in men's capacities. If you've read my books, you might notice that I don't talk about their capacities. They talk about it all the time and they try to make it inclusive: "Oh, yeah, you're included, too."

But I'm talking about something else. I'm trying to name something that can only be recognized by women who are seizing back our power. But the words have been stolen from us—even though perhaps they were originally our words—they're our words, but they've been reversed and twisted and shrunken. I see myself as a pirate, plundering and smuggling back to women that which has been stolen from us. But it hasn't simply been stolen; it's been stolen and reversed. For example, the christian trinity is the triple goddess reversed. The trinity is aptly described as a closed triangle. It doesn't go anywhere. It's clonehood.

WIE: What do you mean by "clonehood"?

MD: "The father, son and holy ghost, the three men I admire the most . . ." In catholic or medieval theology, the father generates the son, and the son and the father together "spirate" the holy spirit. That's technical Thomistic terminology. They're coeternal, so although there's this illusion of activity, nothing is happening. It's utterly male in its stagnation and utterly male in its repetitiveness. So it's not surprising to me that ultimately they would come, in their destruction of the earth and of all living beings, to cloning. Because sameness is the name of patriarchy; it's the name of the game.

WIE: You see cloning as a product of patriarchy?


MD: It's the living out of patriarchal myth. They live it out through their technology as well as through their religion, their art, their societal structures, their economies and their wars. It's always the same. Their wars are the same. It's infinitely the same. "Getting their big gun off," as Valerie Solanas said.

WIE: While I understand that this isn't a focus for you, I'd like to come back to the question of differences between women's and men's approaches—

MD: You know, I don't mean to be unpleasant, but we're coming from different worlds. I was trained in that world of thinking, a certain christian or Western philosophical way, but I don't want to be drawn into talking that way because I don't relate to it and it irritates me. What I love is the way women think. And what's so precious about my space at Boston College is that it's women's space. When you get a teacher and students who really want to be with women, and we seize the space and read philosophical works and literature by women, they begin to think like themselves. They feel as if they've come home again. And that is the very groundwork of radical feminism. So if our space is taken away from us, which is what they're attempting to do at Boston College, then so is the possibility of that kind of, I won't call it dialogue, that kind of spinning conversation, of matching experiences. It's not debating, which is a male thing. Something new begins to happen, and that's why new words have happened for me: because the old language, the patriarchal language, does not contain words that are adequate to name women's experience. And it is so exciting. I'm talking about women's elemental experience.

I was brought up in the patriarchal way of thinking. I spent years in school getting degree after degree after degree taught by patriarchs. At Fribourg I was with all male fellow students: two hundred seminarians and priests and me. I know how they think and I abhor it.

WIE: So would you say that women inherently have a greater capacity to realize the interconnectedness of the entire universe that you've been speaking about?

MD: Comparisons with men are beside the point. I think women have a great capacity to realize that interconnectedness. I have not seen this in men. There may be exceptions, but I'm not interested in that.

In the early seventies, Susan Griffin wrote a book called Women and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, and it was totally about the connectedness of women and nature. And I have always emphasized that myself. But one of the horrible, self-censoring and destructive events within women's studies and the so-called women's community that happened—and I'm sure it was imbedded from some alien source—was that any woman who said that women have a special connection with nature, or that there's anything like a "female nature," was called an "essentialist," and that was the "worst" thing you could possibly say. I have been accused of being an essentialist, and so has anyone else I respect.

But I'll also argue that whether or not they're inherent, the fact is that the differences between men and women are there, even if it's just through millennia of conditioning. I, of course, think it's inherent. But even if it were cultural, the fact is that this is the way to go if you're biophilic. What I'm concerned with is the war between biophilia and necrophilia. It's love of life versus hatred of life. Necrophilia translates strictly into love of death, or loving the dead—actually f—ing corpses. And in general, patriarchal culture is necrophilic, fixated on hatred of life and love of death.

WIE: It sounds like you're defining the male mode of expression as necrophilic and the female as biophilic. That's quite an extreme distinction.

MD: Look, turn on the news anytime and see what is going on. Kosovo—are women doing that? Look at anything; it's so omnipresent that it's laughable that one would not see it. How many women rape? I'm just telling you that if I say that in a simplistic way, everyone will be on me for being an essentialist. That's why, on a certain level, my book title "Quintessence" is a joke title. I mean it profoundly for what it is. But also, I can always say, "Ah, I'm not an essentialist, I'm a quintessentialist"—I'm worse than you ever could imagine!

WIE: What do you think of the idea that one is a human being or spiritual being first, and then one happens to be male or female?

MD: "Human being" I got rid of a long time ago. No. Absolutely not. It's alien. I've been through that. I've been there. I've thought about that.

WIE: What do you feel are the limits of that way of thinking?

MD: I wrote about human beings in The Church and the Second Sex, which was published in 1968. I wanted to liberate "human beings," and I found out that the whole thing was fallacious because there's a false inclusion, as if there were greater similarity between women and men than there is difference. Let me try to put it in a way that may convey some of the landscape. If we lived in a gynocentric society, first of all, it wouldn't be matriarchal; it wouldn't be like patriarchy transposed with big mama on top instead of big papa. It would be totally different, and I believe that it was before patriarchy came—this evil. And men would be different, too. They would not have been socialized into this—assuming that they have been socialized into it and they're not all mutants—they would be different because the female way of seeing things would be, I don't want to say "dominant" because that's a patriarchal word, but it would be all-pervasive. And you do meet some men like that—I never fully trust it—but you do. Some are less tinged by the patriarchal mode.

So having that in your mind, and living to some extent already in that future, an archaic future that is rooted in a deep past, I have a sense of identity that isn't easily described in this kind of discourse. These kinds of questions are always too crisp. They seem very logical, but they're not. In my opinion, they're not. I would never ask what identity is primary. In the past somehow I made a switch from being "a human being who happens to be female." But I never really believed "happens to be" because at the core of my being I'm female. I know who I am, and therefore I could not be other than a radical feminist once that idea was available to me.

You're taking what I consider to be a very primitive set of ideas and asking me to speak about what I might have thought about those ideas twenty or thirty years ago. You see, "human being" doesn't really say much of anything to me. I don't know if I'm getting it through to you or not, but I'm not a member of a class called "human being." There is a tremendous uniqueness, but that uniqueness surfaces only when you have a predominantly female mode of being that is at the same time daringly, forcefully breaking out of the patriarchal mode of thinking. So, no, I don't feel at all like a human being. I hate the "human species"—look at it! I hate what it is doing to this earth: the invasion of everything. The last two frontiers are the genetic wilderness and the space wilderness; they've colonized everything else. It's a totally invasive mentality—rapist. That is alien, and insofar as I've internalized any of that, I'm sorry. I'm contaminated by it. We all are. But I try not to be, and with every step I at least try to be biophilic, which is what would be required to break out of the human species.