Kaya Oakes - The Defiant Middle: How Women Claim Lifes In-Betweens to Remake the World

Praise for The Defiant Middle

This is a wonderful, wonderful book. While excavating and illuminating the everyday and profound in-betweens that women traverse, it is also an insightful meditation on the liminal realities of religion, and of life writ large. And it is so beautifully, winsomely written! I plan to give this book to every woman I know, beginning with my mother and my daughter.

Krista Tippett, founder and CEO of the On Being Project

The Defiant Middle is the book I didnt know I needed to read. Writing as both companion and guide, Oakes brings readers into conversation with women who have come before, with women who have refused to conform to the categories and expectations imposed upon them. The result is an enlightening rumination on spirituality and embodiment, on the constraints women face, and also the possibilities available to women as they navigate their own journeys.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez, author of Jesus and John Wayne

The Defiant Middle is a life-giving book bound to stir up more questions than give definitive answers. Like the women she admires and wonders about, Kaya Oakes is a guide and companion to the parts of female life and spirituality that are neglected, dismissed, erased, and ignored. For anyone who has ever felt too much of anything, they are bound to feel both seen and known in these pagesand learn to wonder quite a bit at all the complicated stories we have flattened in our history and theology books. Kaya Oakes continues to stand out as one of the best essayists of our time, bringing both her Catholic and gen-x imagination into these thoughtful, complicated pages

D. L. Mayfield, author of The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power

This book is vulnerable and real. For those of us who live in the liminal space known as middle age, The Defiant Middle will change and challenge how we navigate this stage of life. With wit and clarity, Kaya Oakes invites you to reconsider and reevaluate what you think you know by offering her own brilliant insights and the tested wisdom of the saints whove gone before us. In a world of polarities, Oakes speaks to the women in the middle with nuance and dimension. This is a book that will sit by my bedside because its filled with words I dont want to forget.

Karen Gonzlez, author of The God Who Sees: Immigrants, the Bible, and the Journey to Belong

With razor-sharp wit Kaya Oakes cuts to ribbons the last shreds of patriarchy and makes more room for all women to inhabit the spiritual, religious, relational, political, and prophetic selves God has ordained, in defiance of expectations. The Defiant Middle will delight and liberate people of any gender who are ready for its composite wisdom.

Molly Baskette, senior minister, First Church Berkley, UCC

Kaya Oakes

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

THE DEFIANT MIDDLE

How Women Claim Lifes In-Betweens to Remake the World

Copyright 2021 Kaya Oakes. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Cover design and illustration: James Kegley

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-6768-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-6769-6

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

In memory of Paula and Kathleen, and for my nieces and nephew, who will remake the world.

Women in time will come to do much.

Mary Ward, 15851645

It starts happening before you realize it, and by the time you do, the slow, grinding erasures have already begun. At church, the young adult group gets mentioned repeatedly, and even though you look around and realize youre still one of the youngest people there, youve crossed the mysterious river into no longer being a young adult. Youre also very frequently alone in church. Your own generation, the one that was Xed out before it found an identity, lost interest in Christianity around the time of Reagans shining city on a hill and Tammy Faye Bakkers smeared mascara, and only one of your fellow born-in-the-seventies friends takes her faith very seriously, and shes a priest, so its her job. Yet here you are, still trying.

Youre too young for the Senior Celebration of Life! at church but too old for the baseball and beer excursion with a firmly underlined reminder that anyone under 40 is welcome. Youre too old to be on social media but too young to quit. The wrong shape for those jeans but still somehow the wrong shape for those other jeans. Too bland to have so many tattoos but too interesting to stop getting them. Too ambitious to settle for an easy life but too self-critical to settle into anything for long. Too angry, too crazy, too predictable, too surprising, too smart, too capable. Youre a woman, so you are always too much.

A younger friend says you look good for your age, but youre not sure what that means when you watch Big Little Lies and realize Nicole Kidman, four years your senior, has perfectly undisturbed, luminescent skin, like the shimmering surface of a faraway planet, while your own face is forked and pitted. You look for other TV shows, movies, or books about women like you, women who are neither old nor young, neither fat nor thin, neither pretty nor ugly, neither this nor that, and in each of them, the woman is screaming, crying, throwing her phone, frowning in a dressing room, getting divorced, getting cancer, fighting with her children, fighting with her parents, or embarrassing herself repeatedly, every single day. She is, in a word, messy.

But what exactly do we expect a woman to be? In the Roman Catholic tradition, which is the religious and intellectual lens through which I was taught to see the world, the image of Mary as a meek, mild, blonde, and white model of female perfection has caused centuries of problems for the vast majority of women who are nothing like that, including Mary herself. The real Mary, a revolutionarily minded Jewish woman who grew up under the rule of an empire, does not resemble the plaster statues that watched over me in my own girlhood. But I did not meet that Mary until I was well into adulthood. Nor did I meet Dorothy Day, Mary Magdalene, Sister Thea Bowman, Pauli Murray, Julian of Norwich, Dolores Huerta, or any other potential religious role model who resisted those narrow definitions of Christian womanhooduntil decades after I graduated from Catholic school.

The notions about what women should do, think, and feel are entrenched in religion, culture, and history and remain stubbornly persistent well into this fourth wave of feminism. Were expected to be both nurturing and independent. Angry and tranquil. One of the boys and still femme enough to be sexually viable. Racism and classism have made the aspirational image of a thin, wealthy white woman normative, when it is far from realistic for the vast majority. Women are expected to be fertile (otherwise your body is dismissed as a barren wasteland), but not too fertile (otherwise youre burdening society). Self-sacrificing, but not selfless. Women can cry picturesquely on occasion, but clinical depression and anxiety have to be brushed aside or sublimated, because we are always expected to be doing something for someone. We should love and accept our imperfect bodies but still not gain weight or let ourselves go. We should have a girl squad and we should never go anywhere without them, rather than preferring, at least on occasion, to be alone. We can be smart but not brilliant, impressive but not intimidating, friendly but not fawning.