scholarly journals Displacements: Religion, Gender, and the Catachrestic Demands of Postcoloniality

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sîan Melvill Hawthorne
Keyword(s):  
Sustained Attention ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Potential Step ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
Religion And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Mode Of Production ◽  
Academic Study

In this paper I examine the uneasy intersection between ‘religion’, ‘gender’ and ‘postcoloniality’ as it is staged in the sub-field of religion and gender within religious studies and theology. Noting the lack of sustained attention in this field to those postcolonial challenges that might question the prioritization of gender as the site from which critique should be originated, and suggesting that this neglect might compromise the assumption that, because of its alignment with the politics of the marginal, it is comparatively less implicated in colonial knowledge formations, I argue that scholars of religion and gender risk perpetuating imperialist figurations found elsewhere in the academic study of religions. I propose the figure of the catachresis, as theorized by Gayatri Spivak, as a potential step towards displacing those European concept-metaphors and value-codings that both derive from imperialist ideologies and sustain the fiction operational within much, though not all, religion and gender scholarship of a generalizable or normative epistemic subjectivity. I suggest these ideologies ultimately prevent an encounter with the women and men who exist beyond this mode of production and whose priorities may be configured entirely differently to those that seem currently to inform and produce the intellectual itineraries of the field.

scholarly journals Inhospitable Landscapes

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Sîan Melvill Hawthorne
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Disciplinary Identity ◽  
The Future ◽  
Positive Assessment ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Religion And Gender ◽  
And Gender

This paper examines Ursula King’s claim in her edited volume Religion and Gender (1995) that introducing feminist gender-critical approaches in the study of religions constitutes a paradigm shift for the field/discipline. I will sketch a broadly positive assessment of how this claim has been borne out, noting the important connection it advances between scholarly subjectivity and disciplinary identity, and drawing attention to the ways in which the working through of the paradigm shift has implied and instantiated a reconfiguration of disciplinary territory. The topological metaphors that underpin the feminist paradigm shift, as well as traditionally disciplinary terrain and transformation more generally, are helpful for examining how knowledge may be structured, taken apart, and remade, creating and remaking a certain kind of disciplinary citizen-subject on the model of the nation state that enables inclusion, but also exclusion. This latter point then leads to a more critical analysis that examines the function of feminist topologies in religious studies and outlining how the solitary focus on gender in the proposed paradigm shift marginalised race and postcolonial terrain, however much it challenged the androcentrism of religious studies. I will thus suggest that in staying true to the vision that King promotes through all of her work on 'religion and gender', the connection between scholarly and disciplinary identity she invokes, and the future she envisions, demands that the unfinished nature of the paradigm shift must be addressed such that an integrated/intersectional model of inclusion and complexity becomes the foundation for work going forward.

Responding to the Wendy Doniger Controversy

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-39
Author(s):  
Steven Ramey
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Robust Analysis ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Academic Study

The controversy over Penguin India withdrawing Wendy Doniger's book, announced in February 2014, provides an occasion to consider the problems and possibilities within the academic study of religion. As the controversy centered on representations of what both Doniger and her opponents termed Hinduism, the problems with adjudicating contested definitions of religions or the category religions becomes apparent. Rather than assuming that we can present a normative definition of any of these terms, I argue that scholars should avoid applying these contested labels themselves and recognize instead whose application of contested labels that they use. This approach facilitates a more robust analysis of the ways these terms enter the negotiation of various conflicts and the interests and assumptions behind them, making religious studies more relevant to contemporary society.

Editor’s Corner: Critics or Caretakers?

2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 38-39
Author(s):  
Philip Tite
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Short Piece ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Academic Study

A short essay, in responding to an online roundtable (the Religious Studies Project), explores the role of progressive ideology in the academic study of religion, specifically with a focus on debates over Russell McCutcheon's distinction between scholars functioning as cultural critics or caretakers of religious traditions. This short piece is part of the "Editor's Corner" (an occasional section of the Bulletin where the editors offer provocative musings on theoretical challenges facing the discipline).

Theory and Method and the Stakes of a Fragmented Discipline: Or, What Economics Taught Me About the Study of Religion

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Religious Studies ◽  
The Public ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Academic Study

Abstract As a discipline, the academic study of religion is strikingly fragmented, with little engagement or shared criteria of excellence across subfields. Although important recent developments have expanded the traditions and peoples studied as well as the methods used, the current extent of fragmentation limits the impact of this diversification and pluralization. At a moment when the global pandemic is catalyzing profound pressures on our universities and disciplines, this fragmentation makes it difficult to articulate to the public, to non-religious studies colleagues, and to students why the study of religion matters. We therefore too often fall back on platitudes. I argue for a revitalized methods and theories conversation that connects us even as it bears our arguments and disagreements about what we do and how. Courses in methods and theories in the study of religion represent the most viable basis we have for bringing the academic study of religion into the common conversation or argument that constitutes a discipline without sacrificing our pluralism.

scholarly journals A Body of Authority: Reorienting Gender and Power in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Phillip Goodwin
Keyword(s):  
Feedback Loop ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Gender Performativity ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
Spatial Logics

The 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich’s theology, dissolving gender binaries and incorporating medieval constructs of the female into the Trinity, captivates scholars across rhetorical, literary, and religious studies. A “pioneering feminist”, as Cheryll Glenn dubs her, scholarship attempts to account for the ways in which Julian’s theology circumvented the religious authority of male clerics. Some speculate that Julian’s authority arises from a sophisticated construction of audience (Wright). Others situate Julian in established traditions and structures of the Church, suggesting that she revised a mode of Augustinian mysticism (Chandler), or positing that her intelligence and Biblical knowledge indicate that she received religious training (Colledge and Walsh). Drawing from theories on space and gender performativity, this essay argues that Julian’s gendered body is the generative site of her authority. Bodies are articulated by spatial logics of power (Shome). Material environments discipline bodies and, in a kind of feedback loop, gendered performance (re)produces power in time and space. Spaces, though, are always becoming and never fixed (Chavez). An examination of how Julian reorients hierarchies and relations among power, space, and her body provides a hermeneutic for recognizing how gender is structured by our own material cultures and provides possibilities for developing practices that revise relations and create new agencies.

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