Inhospitable Landscapes: Disciplinary Territories and the Feminist "Paradigm Shift" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Disciplinary Feminisms? Religion, (Post)secularism, and the Feminist Subject
This paper emerges from several strands of personal experience: as a feminist scholar based in the study of religion, as a student in the field of gender studies, and as a subject discontent with the progress narratives of secularisation. An important component to my argument is the critique of the category ‘religion’, which emerged from Enlightenment thought as a disciplinary mechanism undergirding colonial expansion as well as androcentric narratives of rationality and progress. This discursive formation continues to shape the contours of academic disciplines, although recent turns toward postsecularism and posthumanism have forged a path for new ways of thinking through historical disciplinary boundaries. Developing along the margins of mainstream, secular feminism are ecological and countercultural spirituality movements which are tied to feminist politics and women’s lived experience in complex ways: posthuman feminist subjectivity is one possible way of conceptualising this.
Studying gender and religion: A look back and a look forward
Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 2005
Feminist scholarship in religion began with the first wave of the women’s movement in the nineteenth century, but became much more extensive with the second-wave women’s movement in the 1970s. This scholarship first explored women’s religious experiences, and then began to investigate the relationships between gender and religion more broadly, what Ursula King has described as a ‘double paradigm shift’. It is now clear that without using gender as an analytical category, religion can no longer be fully described or evaluated. Gender issues permeate religion in very complicated ways, manifesting themselves at levels from the local to the universal, and gender also intersects with other categories of analysis such as race, class, or ethnicity. Gendered study of religion and feminist theology have had a great impact on both scholarship and religious practice, though less impact on the development of main/malestream theology than one might have hoped. The full evaluation of the intersec...
Religion (The Routledge Global History of Feminism)
The Routledge Global History of Feminism, 2022
This article dispels the idea of incompatibility between feminism and religion. To that end, it argues that the intersection of feminism and religion mirrors the diverse ways in which religious folk interpret scripture, perform devotional rituals, inhabit religious institutions, and transform their societies. The first section addresses some key debates and methodologies. The next section examines how religious feminists have acknowledged certain problematic elements in their faith traditions, on the one hand, and how feminist scholars have studied the interplay among religion, power, and Western feminism, on the other hand. The third section discusses the provincialization of secular feminism on the part of historians, feminist theologians, and anthropologists of religion. The penultimate section sheds light on the centering of goddesses and female role models and focuses on the writings of Delores S. Williams and Vasudha Narayanan. The final section examines how feminist theologians appropriate religious authority through scriptural hermeneutics and women’s leadership in religious communities.
Religion Gender and Race: A Polemic (Contracted Book Proposal)
Bloomsbury Series in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality, 2021
Religion and gender, as a distinct field of study, has been staged as a critical intervention against the exclusion of gender as an analytic category within the interdisciplinary study of religions. Emerging from the pioneering work of feminist scholarship in theology, it has tended to share and replicate feminist commitments to retrieving women’s voices and practices, examining men’s voices as specifically gendered and heterogeneous, and to work for the reform of the conceptual domains that reproduce various forms of gendered (and indeed sexual) exclusions. However, this volume questions how and challenges why 'gender' has been a prioritised normative centre in the field of religion and gender. It both polemically indicts this prioritisation from the perspectives of black, womanist, post- and decolonial feminist theories and practices and builds on these to propose a reconstruction of the field’s core preoccupations, categories, and histories. Scholars have exposed the ethnocentric genealogy of ‘religion’ and questioned its adequacy as a means of classification because of its instrumentalisation by colonial and racist power formations. In Religion, Gender, and Race: A Polemic, Hawthorne offers a similar challenge to the feminist genealogy of ‘gender’, denouncing its limitations as a critical tool of analysis and a means of achieving justice, liberty, and equality because of its constitutive neglect and marginalisation of race. This books asks whether the particular texture and framings of gender within this genealogy—liberal, secular, colonial, Eurocentric, and white—foreclose how we may (and may not) think of gender and its relationship to all that is named religion or religious.
Feminist approaches to the study of religion.
This article is a genealogy of feminism and feminist approaches to the study of religion. It is genealogical in the sense that I wish to speak to the development of feminist theorizing and its engagement in the work of feminists in the study of religion. To do this I first provide a processual narrative or locating the “events” of feminism (proposing series rather than unity) in the conditions of possibility that allowed for the acceptance of feminist “waves” one through three, as they are often times referred. The conditions of possibility are, as Michel Foucault wrote, “particular stages of [social] forces” (1984, 83) that support, either positively or negatively the discourse(s). In my development of a genealogy of feminism, I consider some successes, but also important prohibitions in feminist discourses, and their manifestation in the feminist narratives generated in the study of religion. These prohibitions, or places where feminist voices sometimes cease, are important to make apparent if only to remind ourselves feminists too have not arrived at the end of history.
This article pays critical attention to the ways in which academic feminism has regarded religion. Issues related to religion and gender have by and large either been ignored or treated quite stereotypically. I have called this phenomenon a simultaneous under-and overestimation of religion. The phenomenon is not global. Feminists of the global south tend to pay much more and more multi-faceted attention to religion than scholars from the global north. I will illustrate this problem through a close reading of intersectionality in feminist research in religion, especially feminist theology. My argument – which can be supported by evidence from historical records – is that what has been called intersectionality since Kimberlé Crenshaw, has in fact been explicitly present in early feminist theology (1970s-). The reason why feminist liberation theologians stressed the interstructuring of gender, class, and race/ethnicity lies in their practical and theoretical cooperation with liberation and feminist theologians from the global south, for example through the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). My article is a critical re-reading of the history of feminist theorizing from the perspective of religious feminists, academic feminist theologians and liberation theologians from both the global north and south (including black and womanist theologians from the USA, Latin America and Africa). My aim is to correct a long-held understanding of the history of feminist theorizing as purely " secular " .