Barth on Gender: A Thought Experiment

A few years ago I posted some reflections about Karl Barth on Gender Roles wherein I reflected on a Paul Fiddes essay and an episode from Barth's Safenwil pastorate in order to dig deeper into the nuances of Barth's apparently traditional position on the delineation of gender roles.

I've since had occasion to revisit the relevant passage of Barth's Church Dogmatics (namely volume III/4, §53.1) and have come to the maintain the view expressed there, which is to say that on the whole Barth displays "an openness to women in leadership" and mutual submission even though it "is articulated within an account that places women in an intrinsic place of submission."

What's interesting is that the mutual submission approach seems more consistent with other moves in Barth's theology, not only elsewhere but also within the section on "Man and Woman". The section would arguably make more sense and be more fruitful if the inconsistencies were ironed out.

This month at SST in Warwick I was glad to run into someone who is doing doctoral research on precisely this, and who seems to be untying the knots of that Barthian dilemma in a critically constructive direction. It will be fascinating to see how this works out, not only as it pertains to women in leadership but also to broader questions of masculinity and femininity. These questions are more prescient and pressing in our day than Barth could have fully anticipated in his.

On that note, I was interested to come across an excursus later in that same volume (III/4, §56.2) wherein Barth discusses the social customs and self-understandings of "youth", observes how quickly they fossilize almost into mini-idealogies, and then makes a ponderous comparision to the dynamics of masculinity and femininity. Here is how it begins:

Youth which proclaims itself as such ... already contains within itself the seeds of death and moves on rapidly to speedy old age. "For we are young, how grand it is!" But not in itself! Youth is like masculinity or femininity. If we want such things in and for themselves, we shall be neither young nor masculine nor feminine.

The point is that if you focus on an abstract ideal at the expense of your personal and social particulars, you end up with neither the ideal nor the actuality. This got me wondering what it would look like to take him up on the parallel and to altar the rest of the paragraph to apply instead to gender. In what follows you'll see the result of that thought experiment.

First, here are four quick explanations of what I've done:

1.  Given that Barth used masculine pronouns for all humanity, simply for the sake of readability I have carried out the thought experiment by replacing youth words with masculinity words.
2. Where the issue of age or maturity still needs to be retained for it to make sense, I have used words pertaining to boyhood or adulthood. In one place I have a question mark because I was not sure whether I should have left the reference to age.
3. At one point where there is clearly an idealogical social norm in view, I have used the colloquialism "man's man" to convey the implication. 
4. All replaced words are surrounded by square brackets, and I've inserted paragraph breaks for the sake of reading on screen.

Without further ado, then, here is the altered excerpt, picking up with the last sentences above.

Youth is like masculinity or femininity. If we want such things in and for themselves, we shall be neither young nor masculine nor feminine.

We can be [masculine] only when we are moved by something which in itself has nothing at all to do with our [gender] or [sex], and in relation to which we are summoned even as young men to advance.

We can be [masculine] only in specific demonstration of our preparedness, attention, zeal and obedience, only in [masculine] objectivity, and not by chasing the phantom of what is supposed to be [masculine] objectivity.

[Masculinity] is the capacity and will to devote oneself to an object without considering or intending that the matter of this devotion should be specifically [masculine], but rather in suppression of any such consideration or intention and with the serious aim of rivaling the objectivity of those who are older [?].

He who wants to be a ["man's man"] is not [a man]; he is merely [man]ish. He who is a [boy] does not want to be a [man]; he takes his play, his study, his first attempts at accomplishment, his first wrestlings with his environment, in bitter earnest, as though he were already [a man].

In so doing he is genuinely [boy]like. This is what it means to accept the command of the particular hour in true loyalty to its specific determination, to be free in its distinctive limitation (CD III/4, p. 609).  

If what Barth says here was allowed to ripple through his account of gender roles, I wonder if it would take the trajectory even further away from patriarchal orderings. It also wonder how compatable this is with what Judith Butler argued forty years later. 

But I am going to leave it at that without further comment, not because I'm simply accepting it at face value as an articulation of Barth's view of gender, but because it's just a thought experiment to mull over. The possibilities probably speak for themselves. Let me know if you run across this and have any thoughts or clarifications.