Trin Min-ha and inbetween religious language painted with red and gray colors.

Abstract

Trinh T. Min-ha (1952-) is a Vietnamese feminist and poststructuralist filmmaker and thinker. The article uses Trinh’s theories of symbolic language and in-between spaces to reflect on gender in religious language in the West. Trinh writes of the myth of sun and moon and argues for a possible gap that opens up to thinking about women in relation to this dark luminary of fragrance and mystical glow, conveyed to us through storytelling, festivals and traditions. In a move parallel to Trinh’s, I am pondering the traditional Western imagery of light and the gender of light, where the female moon is so often seen as a helpmate to the masculine sun. The traces of this relationship can for example be seen in the depictions of Christ as sun and Mary as moon, as well as in Nordic mythologies. I am painting these images in Trinh’s colours, in gray and red, in-betweenness and plurality of meaning, in which old and new religious images are formed and reformed.