| Summary: | While women in every culture have learned to identify with male heroes in forming their own subjectivity as rational feeling and flourishing agents, India has a long history of men identifying with female spiritual exemplars. Here we address Zizek or Kristeva's call for a "strong self" grounding ethical and spiritual commitment across genders, by asking what kind of subjectivity can inspire such transformative empathy able to attract a range of selves across gendered and social divides to "become the Goddess." In the theological narrative poem the <em>Gitagovinda</em>, Radha is a passionate women who both becomes divine, and incorporates her divine lover and audience into her divinity. The narrative form of her iconography manifests the emotional reason of an embodied religious agency, and through the affectivity of the poem she is able to share this fluid subjectivity, manifesting a pluralistic form of monism that is only one of Hinduism's many variations on a supposedly "pantheistic" model. Patterns of subjection are traded for alternating dynamics of passionate commitment. In Indian culture Radha continues to serve as an exemplary model of female-neutral subjectivity for all persons - an active, non-substantial, shared, strong self that rationally embraces its (religious) passions. As such she offers material for feminist philosophy of religion's new era of single parents, diverse cultures and multiple genders, suggesting that freedom be complemented by an affirmation of the passions for which freedom has its worth.
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