Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Foreword
- List of Contributors
- Introduction and Overview
- Ms.Calculating the Apocalypse
- The Apocalyptic, Gender and American Christian Fundamentalism
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Dare? Confronting Anti-abortion Terrorism after 9/11
- Apocalyptus Interruptus: Christian Fundamentalists, Sodomy, and The End
- The Joy of (Apocalyptic) Sex
- ‘The Second Descent of the Spirit of Life from God’: The Assumption of Jemima Wilkinson
- Making Space, Taking Space: The Dynamics of 1980s Peace Activist Women's Efforts to Reclaim and Transform the Public Arena
- ‘Before, the Cup Was Filling Up. Now It Is Flowing Over’: The Eschatology of Fluids
- Visions of Mary, Wounds of Christ: Women Stigmatics in the Apocalyptic Piety of Recent Marian Apparitions
- Rhetoric of the Rejected Body at ‘Heaven's Gate’
- Eccentric Citizens: Subjectivity and Citizenship in the Technomillennium
- Index
‘The Second Descent of the Spirit of Life from God’: The Assumption of Jemima Wilkinson
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Foreword
- List of Contributors
- Introduction and Overview
- Ms.Calculating the Apocalypse
- The Apocalyptic, Gender and American Christian Fundamentalism
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Dare? Confronting Anti-abortion Terrorism after 9/11
- Apocalyptus Interruptus: Christian Fundamentalists, Sodomy, and The End
- The Joy of (Apocalyptic) Sex
- ‘The Second Descent of the Spirit of Life from God’: The Assumption of Jemima Wilkinson
- Making Space, Taking Space: The Dynamics of 1980s Peace Activist Women's Efforts to Reclaim and Transform the Public Arena
- ‘Before, the Cup Was Filling Up. Now It Is Flowing Over’: The Eschatology of Fluids
- Visions of Mary, Wounds of Christ: Women Stigmatics in the Apocalyptic Piety of Recent Marian Apparitions
- Rhetoric of the Rejected Body at ‘Heaven's Gate’
- Eccentric Citizens: Subjectivity and Citizenship in the Technomillennium
- Index
Summary
Although it was the ‘Eleventh Hour’, a ‘sifting time’, when the Spirit assumed the body of Jemima Wilkinson (1776), what opened out from the psycho-social ruptures effected in Jemima and her community by the just emerging industrial economy was, as Jemima's visionary visitants proclaimed, ‘room, room, room’. Jemima Wilkinson, the first American-born female utopian leader, was (according to her own religious sensibilities) raised up by the Spirit, during what Barbara Epstein has called the ‘female revivals’, which occurred in New England's upland hill country between the First and Second Great Awakenings. In this article, I consider how Wilkinson, by leaning into the surrounding early industrial, socio-economic anxieties and into the energies of religious apocalypse (through which these anxieties were interpreted), attempted to open out a communitarian economics and to create a social structure or ‘living room’ amenable to the lives of women by making ‘Spirit’ mean otherwise. Christianity's dominant discourse of Spirit-as it has been calibrated to gender and to economics-has been communally incarnated as authorizing male entitlement-namely, authorizing the hierarchy of (male) spirit-mind over body; where land and women's bodies have been analogs within the proprietary patriarchal imaginary, both were then to be titled and tilled. But what counts as natural law, feminist philosopher Judith Butler has asserted, remains vulnerable to performative social recitation—and so also necessarily vulnerable then to performative re-citation or iterative variation.
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- Gender and Apocalyptic Desire , pp. 76 - 89Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2006