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This study explores the emancipatory potential in different strands of contemporary Christian feminist theology. The study develops a comprehensive understanding of how subjectivity, vulnerability, and relationality intersect with and impact Christian feminist ethics, which seeks to counteract patriarchy and promote emancipation. This is operationalized by the research question: How do different understandings of subjectivity, vulnerability, and relationality relate to Christian feminist ethics and its emancipatory potential? To answer this, the author explores how subjectivity, vulnerability, and relationality are understood in three prominent models of contemporary Christian feminist ethics as devised by Susan Frank Parsons, Catharine Keller, and Denise M. Ackermann.

The theoretical framework used to analyze the views of the three theologians draws primarily on the works of Judith Butler and Hille Haker. Additionally, Michel Foucault’s understanding of power is crucial to assessing different models’ emancipatory potential. The study challenges prevalent perspectives that are often found in Christianity, and seeks to move beyond such ideologies and practices that use Christian traditions to legitimize domination, especially of women.

The author argues that a dialectical understanding of subjectivity, vulnerability, and relationality provides new critical resources for Christian feminist ethics. Ethics and theology are seen as mutually reinforcing; and it is argued that Christian feminism should embrace a self-reflexive stance that is devoid of triumphalism, and support a theology that does not promote or support domination of others.

The author argues for a constructivist approach to gender, since it provides more nuanced resources for the critique of different forms of patriarchy if compared with essentialism, which risks reinforcing dualisms that could support hierarchical divisions. As a critique of the mind/body dualism devised after Descartes, the author argues for a dialectical approach to mind and body—an approach that challenges hierarchies and domination. Subjectivity is argued to be constituted relationally; and vulnerability, as an ontological condition of human existence, should be embraced rather than eliminated.