This essay begins by outlining the dispute between two feminist writers and influencers, Florence Given and Chidera Eggerue. Here I discuss Eggerue’s claims that Given has plagiarised the style and content of her work. Having done so, I suggest that this case study raises important questions about privilege, positionality, and the authority of voice. By exploring similar questions in Mark’s presentation of the Syrophoenician woman, I argue that normative scholarship of this pericope has often failed to account for its complexities of identity and privilege. Tracing through Theissen’s work and a postcolonial intersectional framework, I observe that there are compelling reasons to suggest the Syrophoenician woman was a privileged figure, and that her reception in scholarship demonstrates the influence of her privileged perspective. Returning to my own reading of the Given/Eggerue dispute, I consider how my own positionality and sense of privilege might have influenced my reading, as well as the implications of this. By closely linking my interpretive practice to my actions, I propose that my framework should be a critical viewpoint which has as its goal the deconstruction of oppressive power structures. I conclude this essay by questioning the advantages of this interpretive approach and investigating how it might hinder my reading of the case study. I conclude that while an intersectional approach risks developing essentialist categories of inequality, I believe that this strategic political intervention is preferable to a much worse place of inaction, which only privileged readers like myself are able to take.
Let me begin this investigation by providing a brief overview of my chosen case study of contemporary marginalisation. I will do so by means of the social media conflict between Florence Given and Chidera Eggerue, also known online as The Slumflower. Both Eggerue and Given are feminist social activists with significant online followings. In recent years, both influencers have released self-help books that integrate feminist philosophy as well as quirky graphics targeted at a younger audience. Eggerue’s book What A Time to Be Alone was published in 2018 and Given’s similar offering Women Don’t Owe You Pretty was released in 2020. At the start of December 2020, Eggerue expressed her dissatisfaction on social media at the high level of stylistic and conceptual similarity between the two books. Placing them side by side, Eggerue accused Florence of ‘gentrifying’ her work, and even basing it on a chapter of her own book called ‘I do not owe anybody pretty.’[1] In a series of Instagram posts Eggerue said, ‘black women continue to pave the way, set the trends and set the pace.’[2] ‘This is exactly how white supremacy works. It’s unfortunate that there are many black great people out there whose work we will never come to know because, by the time their ideas even reach the surface, a white person gentrified it, hogged the mic and made the narrative all about them.’[3] There are a number of instances where you can see clear similarities between the two books. Both books feature bright covers, colourful drawings, and a layout comprising several micro-essays. Their topics are almost identical, addressing patriarchy, self-worth, and, ironically, privilege. Maybe most notably, Given cites Eggerue in her acknowledgements page, explaining that she needs to ‘to acknowledge that the sections in this book on my understanding of prettiness, desirability, privilege, unconscious bias and systems of oppression didn’t just fall into my head. I had to listen and had to learn, predominantly from Black women.’[4]
Eggerue’s experience might lead us to ask why her work was not allowed to stand on its own merit. Unfortunately, as Michelle Obama discovered at the hands of Melania Trump[5], the obscuring, shadowing, and reformulation of black women’s intellectual output is neither accidental nor benign. Whiteness continues to shape the normative practices of recognition and citation in a manner that favours white thought and devalues non-white output. As Trudy writes of her own experiences of plagiarism by white women, ‘a lot of Black women develop theory that is often mocked at first, plagiarized second, and absorbed into the mainstream last, often where the originators are erased altogether.’[6] Indeed, the nefarious nature of our case study is laid bare in the fact that numerous screenshots appear to show that a company or organisation pays to promote Given’s book on Google as the first result for the search term ‘Chidera Eggerue’ (something that Given denies knowledge of).[7] Those familiar with targeted advertising will recognise that this is unlikely to be accidental and is instead a deliberate weaponization of power, technology, and economic capital to ensure a white woman’s voice is prioritised over a black woman’s. The plagiarism which Eggerue accuses Given of is a contemporary example of the way subjective factors such as race, class, and gender have a deep influence on the construction and prioritisation of knowledge. Given and Eggerue are both women, but to regard their gender as an isolated aspect of their experiences would be to ignore the continuing influence of white supremacy. The acknowledgement that gender is never experienced separately from race and class are hallmarks of intersectional theory, as is the vital observation that who we are when we speak is important as what we say. With this in mind, let us now turn to the Syrophoenician woman and explore how intersectional theory may be able to illuminate my reading of both the pericope and our chosen case study.
The story of the Syrophoenician woman is important to us because it helps us explore the essence of our relationship to our literary subjects and the ways in which power is embedded in our interpretations. Mark 7:24-30 portrays the brief account of the healing of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter. This account is widely regarded as the primary source for the Matthean version in 15:21-28. According to the Markan version, Jesus travels to Tyre’s gentile region and enters a house. His arrival is followed by the entry of a Syrophoenician woman who requests healing for her daughter. In response, Jesus refuses, and rebukes her with the following: ‘let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’[8] Scholars commonly interpret the term as an insulting rejection of the woman’s request and a suggestion that Gentiles are unclean animals. Unsurprisingly, commentators have struggled with Jesus’ response, going to great lengths to theologize it into something more palatable. For example, some interpret Jesus’ response in the form of a parable or rhetorical communication by which he confirms Gentile inclusion in the church’s mission. As Rhoads puts it, the Syrophoenician woman is ‘the woman who paves the way for the whole mission to the Gentiles.’[9] Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a feminist scholar, advocates for a re-reading of these passages in a way that changes ‘the timeless word of God engraved in stone into nourishing and sustaining bread in our struggles for liberation and justice.’[10] Thus, she praises the woman for speaking out against Jesus’ patriarchal prejudice, and she celebrates the woman as a ‘paradigm for feminists who transgress intellectual and religious boundaries in their movements towards liberation.’[11] In each of these approaches, Jesus’ response has been challenged and integrated into either a missional function or an element of feminist emancipation.
When I approach these interpretations, I am struck by the sometimes shallow attempt to investigate the overlapping ideologies of power that might have affected Jesus’ response to the woman. The common attempts by interpreters to explain away Jesus’ harsh words rely on the assumption that they are in some way at odds with Jesus’ normative ministerial vision, rather than an integral part of how this message is realised. What would happen if we analysed privilege and situation in this story, in a Foucauldian sense, as the mode of action upon the actions of others.[12] Human behaviour – speech and acts – can only exist within a context that is specified by particular ways of being. In other words, Jesus was responding to this woman as a person in history with a dynamic and multifaceted social status, rather than as a prototypical example of a woman or Gentiles. Similarly, our normative interpretation of this story has been influenced by a largely white tradition in which questions of intersectionality have been pushed to the side in favour of a missional justification for conversion. As Dube puts it, ‘there is little or no attention paid to colonial and postcolonial theories and era, often leaving behind as a result-unattended and unquestioned-the imperial setting, the violence of imperialists, and the collaborative stance of the colonized.’[13] What is required here, then, is an intersectional reading of the Syrophoenician woman that invites us to explore the intersections of class, race, and religion, in both the story and its interpretation. This hermeneutic rejects the dominant reading of history in favour of an interpretive viewpoint that examines how positionality and power have influenced our normative understanding. As a result, it becomes suspicious of the interactions and interpretations of the colonial enterprise, the white-normative academy, and the ways in which these can harm or silence the colonised other. This intersectional, post-colonial, epistemic framework will then allow me to consider my own positionality in the story as well as how the act and message of interpretation affects the real world.
Let us begin by challenging some of the assumptions underlying current paradigms for interpreting the Syrophoenician woman. For instance, many interpretations of the pericope are based an assumption that in first-century gender and political economy the Syrophoenician woman was needy and/or of lower status than Jesus. However, as Gerd Theissen has argued, a different interpretation might be plausible if we consider the potential benefits that the woman would have held as a member of several dominant groups. According to Theissen, the woman’s portrayal as Greek provides a useful insight into her social status and shows that she was a Hellenized member of the upper class.[14] Furthermore, he brings our attention to the fact the woman’s daughter has a bed rather than a mattress which is what you would expect from a wealthier city dweller.[15] The economic inequalities between affluent Tyrians and Jewish peasants highlight the ramifications of these designations. As a wealthy ‘Hellen,’ the woman would have benefited from an economic structure under which food was distributed away from the local, mostly impoverished, Jewish population and toward the affluent Greek citizenry.[16] When Mark speaks of a Greek Syrophoenician woman, then, he arguably speaks of an elite member of the socio-political dominant class, who would have been seen as directly responsible for the plight of the poor. By retrieving something of this multi-layered reality of persons, groups, and experiences, we have gained an insight into the power dynamics that were potentially at play in Jesus’ sharp response. In this context, Jesus’ verbal rebuke may be interpreted as a paradigmatic example of his preferential concern for the poor and of his reversal of the reigning order. As Thiessen puts it, Jesus’ response might have been intended to mean, ‘first let the poor people in the Jewish rural areas be satisfied. For it is not good to take poor people’s food and throw it to the rich Gentiles in the cities.’[17]
As a result of recognising the interconnected forces that influence the dynamics of inequality and social dominance, we have found a reading of our text that contradicts our normative understanding. This reading approach challenges me and encourages me to reflect more deeply on my own interpretation of the Given/Eggerue situation. Here I can see similarities between Given and the Syrophoenician woman. In both cases, the women have tried to draw attention to their struggles in ways that fail to sufficiently situate their positionality within a power hierarchy in which they are responsible for replicating other forms of oppression. Despite their restricted and privileged backgrounds, they have both sought, or have been assumed to be, prototypical examples of womanhood. In both cases, the outcome has been detrimental to the ‘other’, as in the case of the poor of Tyre or Eggerue in our modern case study. Of course, while privilege operates in the individual, it also reverberates in ways that can be seen in secondary response and interpretation. For example, we have recognised that the privilege of the Syrophoenician woman has been obscured in previous historical studies. These flaws can be attributed in part to the subjective difficulties of discerning a complete and stable subject, particularly in written text, but they must also be linked to the numerous practises and institutions of power that have chosen not to critically engage with the text. It is mainly this type of power that I am interested in for understanding my case study, as it corresponds more closely to the positionality that I bring to the story as an external reader. For although interpersonal power may indeed permeate individuals and texts, this does not preclude the individual reader from recognising and combating it. In my reading, the challenge will be to articulate the critical question of agency and the will to resist power in a way that gives authorial voice to those who have previously been silenced.
Perhaps, then, we should begin by taking a step back and listening to those who have been affronted by the imposition of power. As we have seen, the normative treatment of this story in the tradition has been to dismiss Jesus’ rebukes as abnormal and to go to great lengths to exonerate him of the charge of wrath. But what if, as I have argued, Jesus’ anger is not an uncontrolled expression of rage, but a well-considered reaction to an oppressor. By theologising Jesus’ words into something they are not, the normative tradition has risked silencing Jesus’ prophetic protest against a system that would leave the poor destitute. They have done so through a hermeneutical outlook which has hitherto failed to consider ‘the critical insight that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena.’[18] Because they are unwilling to listen to him on his own terms, they have become blinded to the radical thrust of Jesus’ person and work. When I apply this perspective to my interpretation of the Given/Eggerue situation, I observe a similar weaponization of privilege over Eggerue. In addition to the white-washing of her original words, the press, publishing companies, and other influencers have gone to great lengths to present Eggerue as unreasonable. On the same day Chidera raised her concerns, her management company, the Diving Bell Group, ended her contract with immediate effect.[19] Indeed, the conflict has mostly been portrayed in the press as a frivolous Instagram feud between two women, rather than a genuine issue of racism and privilege. Novara Media, for example, begins their article on the topic with the patronising words ‘there’s trouble in influencer land’ and later characterises Eggerue’s politics as ‘undeveloped or immature.’[20] These responses appear to be deeply rooted in the angry black woman mythology, which presupposes ‘all Black women to be irate, irrational, hostile, and negative despite the circumstances.’[21] As in Jesus’ example, these mechanisms serve to silence the oppressed in their response to the oppressor and divert attention away from the aggressor by blaming the victim.
At this stage, I’ve used an intersectional and postcolonial theoretical framework to form my reading of the Syrophoenician woman and the Given/Eggerue case study. Nonetheless, my analysis would be incomplete without a deeper examination of how my own reading is structured by my relation to the world and how I choose to engage in the act of interpretation. In previous essays, I have argued that the most concrete manifestation of our interpretive activity is in its consequences. This has been a deliberate attempt to blur the line between meaning and application in order that we cannot speak of interpretation separately from our actions. Indeed, both of our case studies demonstrate how reading techniques impact the real world. Normative representations of the Syrophoenician woman have been used to justify expansionist missionary activity, and the misapplication of Eggerue’s words have undoubtedly caused her financial damage. But what about my own interpretive activity; what impact do I have? The challenge for me here becomes adopting a critical perspective centered on my own privileged experience which nonetheless has as its goal the deconstruction of oppressive power structures. The theoretical basis for this approach is intersectionality, which implores me to cultivate the ability to relinquish the privileges of my positionality. As a result, the question in this case becomes what can I do as a result of my feminist and postcolonial reading rather than simply what can I learn. In practice, this means becoming more intentional in my attempts to trace the implications of my interpretations and constantly adapting my reading in response to those consequences. So for example, I might take the time to bring visibility to the Given/Eggerue conflict, as I attempt to do here, particularly with those who would not otherwise engage with the subject. As Anne Bishop reminds us, ‘you can help break through to others’ ignorance of oppression. Members of your own group might hear you when they cannot hear a member of the oppressed group.’[22]
At this point, my interpretive approach might be challenged by those who doubt that a reading strategy can ever fully distinguish any coherent categories of identity or privilege. Is it really possible for me to examine the Given/Eggerue conflict and understand with any degree of certainty how the structures of power are embodied? Perhaps more strikingly, is it possible that by using intersectionality as my model of identity and bringing attention to this conflict I have made invisible the perspectives of those who are oppressed in other ways? The central question here is whether there can really be genuinely objective definitions of identity that bind a marginalised individual to a group. In my reading of the Given/Eggerue dispute, for example, I have relied on the assumption that the categories of white woman and black woman can be known monolithically to the degree that we can recognise the power structures contained within them. Undoubtedly, this required me to make narrow assumptions about the characteristics and experiences common to all women, white women, and black women respectively. Upon closer inspection, this forceful fragmentation of identity has forced me to choose an essentialist interpretation of identity, the very schema that advocates of intersectionality seek to dismantle. Maintaining an understanding based primarily on these lines risks removing from visibility those people who view their womanhood and race as a kaleidoscope of non-normative concepts, such as queer, butch, femme, inter-racial, and so on. As Angela Harris has noted, under these types of essentialisms ‘as long as feminists, like all theorists in the dominant culture, continue to search for gender and racial essences, black women will never be anything more than a crossroads between two kinds of domination.’[23] Indeed, some have already suggested that Eggerue herself is privileged because she is a black woman with a platform, and that by describing her own experience as normative for black women, she has framed gendered restitution as just for her.[24]
Because we are not equipped to precisely identify the constituents elements of privilege, does this mean we should abandon all talk of identity? Making this point from my comparatively privileged position would be an insult to those who are unable to choose this neutrality. Taking neutrality with regards to identity is never neutral, but rather, a return to the status-quo which was only ever really posing as neutrality. As Patricia McAuliffe has put it, ‘we can give the impression of neutrality, of not choosing at all, because to support the established order is to engage in routine, to move with the flow, to refrain from deliberation and perhaps even to disattend from the situation.’[25] My reading of this conflict attempts to move from an analysis of systems of oppression to action with the urgency that the situation requires. I am painfully aware that constructions of the ‘other’ in intersectional identity necessitate maintaining the false promise of politically meaningful and stable characteristics of identity in a way that can itself obscure the power relations of other forms of oppression. Making this decision is not a matter of detached imprecision, but of going ahead pragmatically even if and when these decisions are troublesome. Here it might be worth employing what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has coined strategic essentialism. Strategic essentialism can be understood as a ‘strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest.’[26] In doing so, we take the calculated risk of adopting an essentialist stance with regard to identity categories such as race, gender, and sexuality, in order to avoid the much worse risk of not representing the oppressed subject at all. As a result, in the service of liberationist goals and political strategy, I am willing to take the risk of discussing the privilege of the Syrophoenician woman as well as the relationships between white and black women. But importantly, by using an intersectional structure, I seek to broaden the scope of participation and consider as many of the multitude of strategically essentialized identities that could constitute oppression. My hope is that this reading is more fluid and reflexive than one that ignores identity entirely or constructs it solely on the basis of normative control.
Thus, as I hope this essay has demonstrated, identity and privilege exert significant power over the voices that we deem normative and how those voices are viewed in an interpretive community. In the examples of the Syrophoenician woman and the Given/Eggerue conflict, we have observed the ways in which individual aspects of identity coalesce to create a political and social subject with the potential to create harmful consequences. An intersectional approach has assisted me in reading and understanding the ways in which these elements of privilege can work to silence the oppressed, but also the role I bring to bear as a reader in these conversations. Since interpretation is inextricably linked to our actions in the real world, even small-scale interpretive activity has the ability to boost the voices of those who have previously been silenced. Although this requires me to make tough decisions about how and where in my reading I interpret privilege, refusing to draw these lines would be a failure to recognise my own advantageous positionality. Thus, as James Cone has well put it, ‘we must make decisions about where God is at work so we can join in the fight against evil.’[27]
[1] Eggerue qtd in Sarah Young, “Chidera Eggerue Accuses Florence Given of ‘copying’ Her Book”, The Independent, December 10, 2020, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women/chidera-eggerue-florence-given-copy-book-instagram-b1769249.html.
[2] Eggerue qtd in Faima Bakar, “The Slumflower Says Florence Given’s Book ‘looks the Same’ as Her Own Texts”, Metro, December 27, 2020, https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/10/the-slumflower-says-florence-givens-book-looks-the-same-as-her-own-texts-13726541/.
[3] Independent, ‘Chidera Eggerue.’
[4] Florence Given, Women Don’t Owe You Pretty (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2021), 120.
[5] BBC News, “US Election: Melania Trump ‘plagiarised’ Michelle Obama’, July 19, 2016. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-36832095.
[6] Moya Bailey & Trudy, ‘On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism’, Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 4 (2018): 3.
[7] Independent, ‘Chidera Eggerue.’
[8] Mark 7:27, ESV.
[9] David Rhoads, “Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman in Mark: A Narrative-Critical Study”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXII, no. 2 (1994): 367.
[10] Elisabeth Fiorenza, “A Feminist Critical Interpretation for Liberation: Martha and Mary: Luke 10:38–42”, Religion and Intellectual Life 3, no. 2:21–36 (1986): 22.
[11] Elisabeth Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 97.
[12] Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power” in: Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), 221.
[13] Musa Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (United States: Chalice Press, 2012), 168.
[14] Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context (Fortress: Fortress., 1991), 69.
[15] Theissen, ‘The Gospels in Context’, 70-71.
[16] Sharon Ringe in Amy-Jill and Marianne Blickenstaff, A feminist companion to Mark (A Gentile woman’s story, revisited: rereading Mark 7.24-31) (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 85.
[17] Theissen, ‘The Gospels in Context’, 75.
[18] Patricia Collins, Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas, Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 41 (2015): 2.
[19] Georgia Aspinall, “‘If You Need A Diversity Reader, You Need To Pass The Mic’: The Slumflower Responds To Florence Given’s Statement,” Grazia, December 15, 2020, https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/in-the-news/florence-given-chidera-eggerue-book-slumflower-twitter.
[20] Ash Sarkar, “The Slumflower Beef Has Exposed the Limits of Influencer Activism,” Novara Media, January 20, 2021, https://novaramedia.com/2021/01/20/the-slumflower-beef-has-exposed-the-limits-of-influencer-activism.
[21] Wendy Ashley, ‘The Angry Black Woman: The Impact of Pejorative Stereotypes on Psychotherapy with Black Women’, Social Work in Public Health, 29, (2014): 28.
[22] Excerpted from Becoming an Ally, Breaking the Cycle of Oppression by Anne Bishop in Alliance for Equality of Blind Canadians, 2011, http://www.blindcanadians.ca/publications/cbm/14/becoming-ally.
[23] Angela Harris, ‘Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory’ in Hilaire Barnett, Sourcebook on Feminist Jurisprudence (London: Cavendish Publications, 1997), 251.
[24] Danielle Dash, “The Slumflower Needs Guidance (From Black Feminists),” TRENCH, March 13, 2019, https://trenchtrenchtrench.com/features/the-slumflower-needs-guidance-but-from-black-feminist.
[25] Patricia MacAuliffe, Fundamental Ethics: A Liberationist Approach (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Univ. Press, 1993), 62.
[26] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Routledge., 1996), 214.
[27] James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation: 50th Anniversary Edition (Orbis, 2020), 7.
