Speaking “religion” through a gender code: The discursive power and gendered-racial implications of the religious label

Drawing on the scholarship of Critical Religion, this article shows how the modern category “religion” operates through a gender code which upholds its discursive power and enables the production of religious—and therefore racial—hierarchies. Specifically, it argues that mentioning religion automatically makes gender present in discourse. Acknowledging religion as an inherently gendered category in this way gives further insight into the discursive power and functioning of the religious label. With the example of the Westphalian production of the “myth of religious violence” and the employment of “religion” in colonial contexts, I demonstrate how a gender code upholds and enables the discursive power of religion. Religion is both gendered (as part of the Western public/private binary) and gendering (in colonial contexts vis-à-vis non-Christian, non-White religions). Acknowledging the multiple ways in which religion is gendered and gendering, then, has important bearings on the analysis of religion’s racializing function which is upheld and aided by the gender code through which religion is spoken.

Religious Studies and the Spiritual Turn

This article surveys the range of positions from which religious studies scholars have generally responded to the spiritual turn. We classify these as: the sociology of religion approach, the critical religion approach, and the practical study for spirituality by professional fields like business, education, and healthcare. In light of recent cultural sociological and historical scholarship on the emic folk category “spirituality” we argue that, given their foundational assumptions, each of these approaches is inadequate for achieving an accurate empirical account of the spiritual turn. We argue that for sociology of religion and critical religion to adequately respond to the professional study for spirituality, they must begin to reckon with the minority consensus developed by cultural sociologists about the spiritual turn. The minority consensus holds that the spiritual turn comprises two components: first, a semantic shift from “religion” to “spirituality,” and second, the crystallization and spread of a shared cultural structure. Coming to terms with this approach will require scholars of religion to reconsider both their assumptions about the category “religion” as well as the limits of their discipline.

Constructing Spirituality in the Cognitive Science of Religion

Seven researchers in the growing field of the cognitive science of religion recently claimed to have documented the unique neural correlates of spirituality separate from and independent of religion. They claimed that spirituality is therefore a natural part of human cognition and suggested that they proved definitively that spirituality is substantively different than religion. Using insights developed by scholars associated with the critical religion approach to the academic study of religion, this article identifies a series of methodological errors that undermine the researchers’ project and that potentially impacts the larger academic study of the cognitive science of religion.

Itako on screen

This article is based on my fieldwork with Itako shamans in the north-eastern part of Japan. The progressive modernisation of Japan at the expense of rural areas has also affected Tohoku, resulting in the ageing of the social fabric of its communities. Within this context, this article focusses on traditional and established activities practised by the blind female Itako shamans, who are going through a process of adaptation. Therefore, the article is concerned with this process and, in particular, on the methodology applied before and during my fieldwork experience of spending time, observing, having conversations, and filming these women in their everyday life. In the attempt to understand and document these shamans, I consider the use of visual ethnographic methods for understanding the changing aspects and their implications on the life of these women. While doing this, I also considered their communities and the area in which they live. I analyse this process by blending different methodologies such as visual methodology and digital visual ethnography and the critical religion approach proposed by Fitzgerald (2000). In addition, the paper will describe how I applied this methodology to provide a fresh look at these women and their daily activity.

Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Power and Whiteness

I have two ambitions in this paper. The first is to explore a framework for talking about the intersections between the categories of race and religion, particularly with reference to critical race and critical religion approaches. The second is to discuss how discourses on religion are a particular type of racial formation, or racialization. The premise for this discussion is the historic, colonial-era development of the contemporary categories of race and religion, and related formations such as whiteness. Both religion and race share a common colonial genealogy, and both critical studies of race and religion also stress the politically discursive ways in which the terms create social realities of inequality. Although the intersections between these terms are often discussed as the ‘racialization of religion’, in this paper I follow Meer (2013) and others by concluding that the category of religion is in itself a form of racialization.