Abstract
“‘Aomen’ is historically, discursively constructed, and always relative to other categories which themselves change,” Denise Riley observes. Perhaps no one should be more aware of the persuasiveness of this claim than the feminist student of religious traditions—traditions that are themselves often deeply implicated in the historical and dis¬cursive construction of “women” as a category. Gender, Joan Scott argues, is simultaneously the interpretation of perceived sexual difference and a primary means for talking about power. This definition resounds profoundly for those who think about religious discourses and practices. As soon as the divine is analogized to the human realm, gender emerges as a problem of both differ¬ence and power. Once that analogy has been mobilized, the two realms seem to oscillate endlessly back and forth, each reflecting and reinscribing the other’s claims. Meanwhile, “religion” is, as David Chidester ably demonstrates in his study of colonialist contexts such as southern Africa, a non-innocent category. Critical feminist readers will no doubt recognize stark parallels between the colonial situation and other political arenas in which the organization of human social life is thoroughly framed by the power to define and to name.
To put it schematically: “women” is historically, discursively constructed, and always relative to other categories which themselves change; “women” is a volatile collectivity in which female persons can be very differently positioned…. The history of feminism has also been a struggle against over-zealous identifications; and feminism must negotiate the quicksands of “women” which will not allow it to settle on either identities or counter-identities, but which condemn it to an incessant striving for a brief foothold…. Can anyone fully inhabit a gender without a degree of horror?1
Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power.2
Although scholars in the human sciences might try to fix their reference, the terms religion and religions do not belong solely to the academy. Outside of the academic arena, these terms have been taken up and mobilized in conflicts over legal recognition and political empowerment. They have been entangled in … historical struggles of possession and dispossession, inclusion and exclusion, domination and resistance.3
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Notes
Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?” Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 1–2, 5, 6.
Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 42.
David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 259.
The literature that founded this movement within the academic study of religion is far too vast to summarize in a single endnote, and the literature that sustains it is yet farther reaching. Accessible and very useful bibliographies can be found in Ursula King, Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest and Promise (2nd ed.; University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 233–59, and eadem, “Introduction: Gender and the Study of Religion,” in Religion and Gender, ed. Ursula King (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 31–38. See also the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, which began publishing in 1985 under the founding editorship of Catholic biblical scholar Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Jewish theologian Judith Plaskow and continues to flourish today.
For a version of the history of feminist interventions into various academic disciplines, see Domna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart, eds., Feminisms in the Academy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). For an assessment of the current state of women’s studies as a field, see Joan Wallach Scott, ed., Women’s Studies on the Edge, a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9:3 (Fall 1997).
In the West, such struggles can be traced backward through women’s battles for access to public institutions (access that was routinely denied through recourse to religious, often biblical, arguments) to earlier struggles over religious authority (struggles that span the full history of Christianity, to choose just one example, into the present day). In the West, the premodern querelles des femmes and the emergence of feminism as a product of Enlightenment arguments concerning reason and virtue—both intellectual resistance movements that struggled mightily with religious institutions and theological arguments concerning women’s natural inferiorities—are important precursors to contemporary feminist interventions into the academic study of religion. On the querelles des femmes, see Joan Kelly’s classic essay, “Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes, 1400–1789,” in Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 65–109. On the Enlightenment inheritance for feminist critiques of religion, see many of the excerpts anthologized in Alice S. Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers from Adams to Beauvoir (2nd ed.; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988; original edition: New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).
While many will argue that “feminism” as an intellectual movement must be carefully historicized and contextualized within this Western Enlightenment frame, some will notice currents of critique of women’s situation outside of the European and American contexts. See, for example, Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
and Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), especially her concept of “gender activism” as a potential solution to the problem of the term feminism.
Russell T. McCutcheon, ed., The Insider / Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader (London: Cassell, 1999);
Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, eds., Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
This is not to make a call for apologetic treatments of religious traditions nor to deny the stark claim by historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith when he writes: “Religion has rarely been a positive, liberal force. Religion is not nice; it has been responsible for more death and suffering than any other human activity.” See Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Devil in Mr. Jones,” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 102–20, quotation at 110. Apologetic special pleadings and facile dismissals of “religion” as simply false consciousness ironically do the same kind of ideological work—refusing to take religion, in all its messy complexity, seriously.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); quotation from Bynum’s introduction at 2.
Ursula King, ed., Religion and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
It should be noticed that the category of “gender” has caused some anxiety in certain quarters. See Darlene Juschka, “The Category of Gender in the Study of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 11 (1999): 77–105, which argues that “gender appears as a neutral category of analysis and is therefore a means by which to depoliticize feminist analysis.” As a consequence, gender registers in her discussion as “a category of analysis …developed within a hegemonic discourse … [a] master’s tool” (77). The opposition that governs Juschka’s critique is feminism/interested/politics versus gender/objective/science, an opposition that does not adequately characterize the literature she surveys or the broader field(s) of feminist studies of gender. Juschka’s critique is far from persuasive, in my view, especially since it does not take into account the wide range of work in critical gender studies, which is unapologetically and unabashedly political in its impulse and effects. (Note that Audre Lorde’s critical concept, “the master’s tools,” goes unattributed.
See Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches [Trumansberg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984], 110–.)
For a subtle engagement of the institutional and political investments of these terms, see Leora Auslander, “Do Women’s + Feminist + Men’s + Lesbian and Gay + Queer Studies = Gender Studies?” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9:3 (Fall 1997): 1–30.
Chidester, Savage Systems, traces the history of the comparative study of religion to the colonial encounter (using southern Africa as his exemplum). See also a wide range of publications in recent years: Robert D. Baird, Category Formation and the History of Religions (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991);
Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993);
Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on sui generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997);
Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999);
Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
See also the review essay by Russell T. McCutcheon, “The Category ‘Religion’ in Recent Publications: A Critical Survey,” Numen 42 (1995): 284–309,
and two recent handbooks for the study of religion: Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and
Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds., Guide to the Study of Religion (London: Cassell, 2000).
Consider the perspective of Morny Joy, “Beyond a God’s Eyeview: Alternative Perspectives in the Study of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 12 (2000):110–40;
see also Marsha Aileen Hewitt, “Ideology Critique, Feminism, and the Study of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 11 (1999): 47–63, for a trenchant argument for separating feminist reconstructive work within religious traditions and the feminist academic study of religion. Hewitt’s discussion would fit happily amidst the discussions cited in the previous note.
Orsi offers two examples for the sort of work he champions and for which he advocates: David L. Haberman, Journey through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
and, perhaps of particular interest to readers of this volume, the groundbreaking work by Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
Of the extensive literature on this subject, see Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly ed., Violent Origins: Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987)
and Susan Mizruchi, The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
A related study of “matriarchy” has just recently appeared. See Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).
Historical and archaeological research on evidence for ancient goddesses and goddess cults is gathered helpfully in two recently published works: Karen L. King, ed., Women and Goddess Traditions in Antiquity and Today (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997)
and Lucy Goodison and Christine Morris, eds., Ancient Goddesses: The Myths and the Evidence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).
Jarena Lee’s autobiography may be found in William L. Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 25–48.
Jackson’s writings have been collected, edited, and published by Jean McMahon Humez in Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson, Black Visionary Shaker Eldress (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981).
To situate these sources within the broader framework of African American women’s religious history, see Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman, eds., This Far by Faith: Readings in African-American Women’s Religious Biography (New York: Routledge, 1996).
I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (2nd ed.; New York: Routledge, 1989; original edition: London: Penguin, 1971).
The literature on the broad topic of “religion and the body” is too abundant and wide-ranging to be summarized here. Among important anthologies here are Jane Marie Law, ed., Religious Reflections on the Human Body (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995);
Sarah Coakley, Religion and the Body (Cambridge Studies in Religious Traditions 8; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Tani E. Barlow and Angela Zito, eds., Body; Subject, and Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);
and Michel Feher, ed., with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Parts I–III (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb, eds., Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), especially the introduction at 3–50.
There are numerous books on “women in Buddhism,” but they tend not to take up explicitly theoretical questions. Among the more important of these, see Diana Y. Paul, Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Mahayana Tradition (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979);
Anne C. Klein, Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995);
and Rita M. Gross, Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993).
See also some of the articles in volume 1 of Haruko Wakita, Anne Bouchy, and Ueno Chizuko, eds., Gender and Japanese History (2 vols.; Osaka: Osaka University Press, 1999).
On a range of religions in Southeast Asia, see some of the articles in Begum Karim Wazir-Jahan, ed., “Male” and “Female” in Developing Southeast Asia (Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women 14; Oxford/Washington, DC: Berg Publishers, 1995).
Fieldwork studies have produced interesting work in both of these geographical areas. See, for example, on Latin America: Elizabeth E. Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995)
and John Burdick, Blessed Anastácia: Women, Race, and Popular Christianity in Brazil (New York: Routledge, 1998).
On Australia, see Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
Some of the founding texts in the field of masculinity studies in religion include Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994)
and James McBride, War, Battering, and Other Sports: The Gulf between American Men and Women (New York: Humanities Press, 1995).
See also Stephen Blake Boyd, W. Merle Longwood, and Mark W. Muesse, eds., Redeeming Men: Religion and Masculinities (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996)
and Björn Krondorfer, Men’s Bodies, Men’s Gods: Male Identities in a (post-) Christian Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1996).
Worthy of special note is a very recent work of historical theology: Virginia Burrus, Begotten, Not Made: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
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Castelli, E.A. (2001). Women, Gender, Religion: Troubling Categories and Transforming Knowledge. In: Castelli, E.A. (eds) Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04830-1_1
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