Drawing from a range of materials, including religious texts, women's literature, field interviews, historical archives, critical theories, and rap music, this book offers important critiques of the way religious and feminist knowledge is constructed. This text looks at white feminist theology and its misunderstanding of Native North American women, Chinese footbinding, and veiling by Muslim women, as well as the Jewish emancipation in France, the symbolic dissection of black women by rap and sermons, and the potential to rewrite and reclaim religious stories. This important reassessment of religious studies offers new visions for the development of anti-colonialist, anti-racist, and anti-sexist discourses of liberation.

Donaldson presents new paradigms of interpretation that help to bring the often oppositional stances of First versus Third World and traditional versus postmodern feminism into a more constructive relationship. She situates contemporary theoretical debates about reading, writing, and the politics of identity within the context of historical colonialism--primarily under the English in the nineteenth century.