Editorial

As I sit here in January, there are so many issues pressing upon us both national and international, our current Prime Minister is unable to tell if he is at a party or not and due to his precarious position is telling Whips to exert undue pressure in the shape of bribes and threats, respectively. Meanwhile, this terrible and even unlawful behaviour distracts from families unable to both heat and eat, threats from Russia, the right to protest being threatened, and the government even attempting to pass legislation that allows them to remove citizenship with no notice to the person concerned. I read Madeleine Allbright’s ‘Fascism: A warning from History’ some years ago and while I have no particular admiration for a woman who claimed rape was a consequence of war and people should just get used to the fact, I am grateful for the book. She lived under a fascist regime and in the book clearly shows how such regimes creep up with initial policies that please many and do not cause much concern with others. As Michael Rosen so eloquently put it, ‘fascism did not come with jackboots but in carpet slippers’. The bedrock of such systems is lies, ‘othering’ and overriding laws that simply do not suit the ruling party. For some time, we have known that politicians play games with the absolute truth, but in recent years, this has become blatantly obvious and at times, it seems there is no desire to hide it, believing as some do that they are above the modes of behaviour expected of others. We saw this so blatantly with Trump who appears to live in a world of his own making where only his truth matters and all else is fake news. But sadly, our own mini Trump seems to believe he too can get away with creating the world in his own image. There are so many leaders around the world who believe this is the reality for them, would it be too obvious to suggest that this is what patriarchy ultimately lends itself too – men creating worlds in their own image! As a number of articles in this issue suggest it is more than patriarchy, although the two concepts are intrinsically linked, it is heteronormativity. This concept stretches well beyond the bounds of simple sexual identification and into the way in which the world is perceived as we see in the work of Marcella Althaus-Reid and others. Certainly, it is a frame that declares normative structures and behaviours which has been applied and is still applied to sexual and gender relations however, what it does by this declaring things as abnormal is to marginalize or even bury emerging epistemologies based in differently lived experience. Within the narrow confines of a gendered and sexualized understanding, it is the straight white man who is the norm and as we have come to see this construction, for that is what it is, is tightly bound into oppressions ranging from gender 1096064 FTH0010.1177/09667350221096064Feminist TheologyEditorial research-article2022