1
Ústav
religionistiky
Elizabeth A. Castelli: Women, Gender, Religion: Troubling
Categories and Transforming Knowledge, in: Elizabeth A.
Castelli (ed.) Women, Gender, Religion, Palgrave: New York
2001, s. 3 - 25
FRVŠ
1890/2005
Téma: Náboženství v genderové diskusi
“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?
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.
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.”
Women' 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 discursive
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 difference 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.
Each of these terms-women, gender, and religion-is inherently unstable. None of them
is tied in an unproblematic way to an easily discerned, identified, or fixed object. Any
attempt to fix their meanings is tied to complicated political, institutional, and material
interests. Each term represents, in other words, a powerfully "troubled" category. This book
brings together a wide range of attempts to examine the places where these terms overlap; at
the same time, it keeps the provisional status of each of these terms in plain view.
This book comes into being more or less a quarter-century after the first feminist
incursions into the academic study of religion, incursions that were part of a broader
intellectual and activist movement to generate a field of academic inquiry that has been
2
widely institutionalized as "women's studies." To be sure, feminists and women
intellectuals/activists/practitioners have most certainly done battle with religious traditions
and institutions for much longer than a quarter-century, as historical evidence stretching
back into premodern settings can amply attest.6 But the impact of feminist studies upon the
academic study of religion has a shorter history, one that has certain things in common with
women's studies as a whole and that diverges in other ways under the influence of the
particular circumstances of the academic study of religion. Feminist work on religion has
participated in the multiform strategies taken up by feminist studies as a whole: historical
recovery and reconstruction, imaginative reconstitution of traditions and practices, and
ideological critique.
But feminist studies in religion have also had their own trajectories that distinguish
them from both women's and gender studies on the one hand and traditional religious
studies on the other. In some cases, feminist studies in religion have amplified the attention
these fields have focused on a particular problem. For example, where there have been
tensions in feminist studies in religion, these have often resided at the border between
"insiders" and "outsiders," raising the question of who has authority to speak about and
critique religious traditions and institutions-and whose perspective bears the greater
authority. Although these kinds of questions have also troubled religious studies and
women's/gender studies as fields, they have been articulated most trenchantly in feminist
studies in religion.
Moreover, feminist studies of religion have brought to women 's/ gender studies a
serious yet salutary challenge. If "women" has long been recognized as too abstract
acategory to be useful for analysis, "religion" has rarely been included in the litany of
qualifiers ("race, class, culture, ethnicity/nationality, sexuality") by which "women"
becomes an ever-more marked and differentiated category. Yet feminist scholars who
intervene in the academic study of religion have often drawn our attention to the
complicated role that religion has played in identity formations, social relations, and power
structures. "Religion" as a category often cuts across the other categories by which identities
are framed (gender, race, class, etc.), and it often complicates these other categories rather
than simply reinscribing them.
It has been an obstacle to some conversations that many feminists, whether activists
or academics, have tended to read "religion" as an abstraction solely in negative termsreading
"religion" only as a form of constraint both ideologically and institutionally, and
reading the embrace of religious affiliations or allegiances primarily as a sign of false
consciousness. This negative rendering of "religion" is in many respects an ironic holdover
from feminism's own Enlightenment inheritance. During the Enlightenment, "reason"
dethroned "dogma" and became the new sovereign. Ever since this revolution in thinking,
two related problems have troubled intellectual life. "Religion," on the one hand, was
produced as a category separate from other elements of human social existence (like
"society" itself). On the other hand, the binary opposition "secular/religious" imposed itself
upon the collective consciousness of the West, especially upon Western intellectuals anxious
to carve up the disciplinary turf according to highly rationalized impulses. The ongoing
legacy of these two effects is still being lived out in struggles over the borderlands that
attempt to keep these two purported opposites (religion/secularism) in their places. As the
work of many of the contributors to this volume will attest, "religion" does extremely
complicated and quite varied work in human societies. It would be foolhardy simply to
bracket religion as though it were easily separable from other aspects of social life or indeed
to dismiss serious engagement with religion as mere false consciousness.
3
"Gender" as an analytical category has added complexity to the discussion in
feminist studies, both in religious studies and beyond it. Fifteen years ago, an important
(now out-of-print) anthology entitled Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols
argued that feminist scholarship had demonstrated the distinctly partial character of the
subject of comparative religion, homo religiosus. The authors whose work is collected in that
book "insist upon the feminist insight that all human beings are 'gendered'-that is, that there
is no such thing as generic homo religiosus." Four years after the appearance of this volume,
Ursula King organized a panel on "Religion and Gender" at the Sixteenth International
Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions in Rome (September
3-8, 1990). A majority of the participants in this three-day-long event revised their papers
for publication in a volume edited by King that appeared five years later under the same
title and organized broadly around "Theoretical Reflections" and "Empirical
Investigations." In a relatively short amount of time, a radical paradigm shift for the
academic study of religion as a whole had been charted.
This paradigm shift chronologically parallels another series of debates in the field of
the academic study of religion highlighting the degree to which "religion" is far from an
innocent or neutral category. Perhaps more importantly, this series of debates has put
forward two serious critiques. First, it has demonstrated how the category of "religion" has
been problematically detached from the specific historical contexts, social frameworks,
political struggles, and institutional constraints that have produced it-as both a category for
analysis and an object for study. Second, it has interrogated how this detachment has taken
place-most notably through a universalizing rhetoric that attempts to mask the conditions by
which "religion" is produced for study. These scholarly discussions have tended not to bring
gender explicitly into view (with a few notable exceptions), and the challenge remains for the
subdiscipline of theory and method in the study of religion to take seriously feminist and
critical gender studies. At the same time, feminist ideological critique may have helped
(alongside postcolonial criticism and critical race theory) to clear a space for precisely this
sort of questioning-even as the subdiscipline of theory and method remains mostly resolutely
focused on a Europeanist and masculinist tradition of philosophers and theorists of religion.
The current volume seeks to intervene in this complicated collection of theoretical
debates. Rather than replicating the work done by other anthologies devoted generally to the
topic of "women and religion," this book is organized around a series of pressing theoretical
problematics and highlights the contributions that different disciplinary approaches can
make to an understanding of these concerns. Each part of the book includes essays that treat
specific examples of religious ideology or religious practice but that also illuminate a
theoretical problem-either a problem for the academic study of religion or a problem for
feminist theory and! or critical gender studies. Examples are drawn from textual traditions,
fieldwork accounts, activism within and outside of religious institutions and communities,
and the interstices of "religion" and other aspects of social life. Frequently, one essay in the
volume can be read with or against another, so that the multiple characters of religion and
feminism or gender activism can come into view. The book is not organized into a monolithic
genetic or teleological narrative. Every essay challenges the received wisdom so that all of
the terms of analysis remain open to interrogation. Taken together, these essays raise a
series of critical questions about how "gender," "feminism," and "religion" many times
operate as unproblematized categories of analysis-and remind readers of how important
keeping these categories troubled can be. In addition, the essays collected in this book call
attention to a wide range of other cognate forms of difference-class, race, colonial status,
sexuality, among others-and read them with and against gender and religion. The book itself
4
is organized into five parts: "Categories of Analysis and Critique: 'Gender,' 'Religion,' and
'Feminism' "; "Origins, Identities, and Appropriations"; "Gender and Religious
Experience: Interdisciplinary Approaches"; "Gender, Religion, and Body Politics"; and
"Gender and Religion in the Politics of the Academy."
Part I of this book, "Categories of Analysis and Critique: 'Gender,' 'Religion,' and
'Feminism,' "is concerned specifically with the theoretical apparatus of "feminist studies"
and "gender studies" of "religion." The book opens with an important exchange between
Miriam Peskowitz and Carol Christ that does two things: it offers access to a part of the
ongoing debate within feminist and gender studies in religion at the same time that it
reminds readers that feminists are by no means monolithic in either their approaches to the
study of religion or their investments in their work. Peskowitz's first short essay ("What's in
a Name? Exploring the Dimensions of What 'Feminist Studies in Religion' Means") was
delivered as part of a panel at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in 1994
celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Journal if Feminist Studies in Religion Writing and
speaking as a Jewish feminist, Peskowitz asks about the variations in the usage of terms such
as gender, sex, sexuality, and religion and then goes on to consider the historical genealogy of
a metaphor that has been central for many feminist interpreters of religion the metaphor of
"weaving." Against the backdrop of a widespread feminist embrace of this metaphor for
women/femininity /femaleness, Peskowitz cautions that such an embrace may mask less
salutary ideological and material realities and may efface and foreclose other feminist
critical questions. In her response to Peskowitz ("Weaving the Fabric of Our Lives"), Carol
Christ questions Peskowitz's ostensible privileging of male writers and argues, "I do not
believe that the negative use of an image in androcentric literary tradition should become
the last word for feminists." Christ turns her attention to the image of weaving in feminist
writing and to the history of women working as weavers. Drawing upon her own experience
within goddess spirituality and contemporary Greek culture, Christ argues for maintaining
the metaphor of weaving as a way of connecting contemporary practice with a continuous
history of women. Peskowitz's response to Christ's intervention ("Unweaving: A Response to
Carol P. Christ") observes that there are important points of difference in viewpoint
between herself and Christ. She raises a series of questions about the impact of privileging
one particular metaphor drawing upon a single aspect of women's worldly activity when
"women have done and do all sorts of things." She offers counter-readings of several of the
anecdotes Christ includes in her response and closes not with a resolution, but with the
recognition that "the differences between us are in some ways paradigmatic of current
debates among feminists who study religion." Christ's "Reweaving" has not appeared in
print before, and it provides a critical response to Peskowitz's reading of Christ's earlier
intervention. Here, Christ glosses her earlier account of her experiences in Greece as they
have become a ground for her work on ancient religious traditions as resources for
contemporary belief and practice, and she challenges Peskowitz's assessments of her work as
occasions of, among other things, universalism and essentialism. Together, this strong
exchange between two important feminist scholars in religion provides a complex portrait of
some of the stakes involved in the methodological and theoretical debates within the field.
In the next chapter," 'Gender' for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a
Word," historian of science and feminist theorist Donna Haraway explores the history,
politics, and discursive range of the term gender. Haraway begins with a brief discussion of
the problems of language and translation (since the ostensible occasion for the writing of this
essay was an invitation to write an entry for a German-language translation of a French
dictionary of Marxism), and with a wry reflection on "how problematic an entry on any
5
'keyword' must be." She opens her discussion of the term itself with an etymological analysis
that quickly moves beyond the constraints of the lexical and the philological-and into the
realms of the historical, the cultural, and the political. Organizing her history of the term in
relation to the writings of Marx and Engels, she divides this section into several subsections
along several organizing themes: "the gender identity paradigm," "the sex-gender system,"
and the emergence of "race" as a category of critical analysis. The essay closes with
reflections on "gender" as a signifier for "difference" and the observation that "the refusal
to become or to remain a 'gendered' man or woman ... is an eminently political insistence on
emerging from the nightmare of the all-too real, imaginary narrative of sex and race."
In the next essay, "The Translation of Cultures: Engendering Yorubi Language,
Orature, and World-Sense," Oyer6nk~ Oyewumi uses the example of Yorubi religion to
problematize the universalizing tendencies of Western feminism-especially as they are
manifest in the category of "gender" itself. This essay applies this general critique by
working through a counter-example in which language (both specific terms and more
general grammatical structures-like gender), epistemology, and lived social and cultural
reality demand a much more nuanced and modulated form of translation than has been
applied to Yorubi culture. Calling Yorubi "a genderless language in a genderful world" and
observing the un examined Western assumption that bodies are always discerned as
gendered, Oyewumi shows how these two insights together allow for misapprehensions
about Yorubi religion by Western scholars, whether feminist or not, to come into view. From
here, she raises broader questions about the impact of Western universalizing categories of
thought, not just in scholarship but in broader social and political institutions (the United
Nations coming under particular scrutiny here). Concluding her essay, she writes, "The
present [discussion] has cleared the way for asking first-order, foundational questions about
gender and difference in Yorubi society. It has shown that our interest in gender in
Yorubiland cannot be divorced from the West's domination of both the constitution of the
academy/scholarship and the sociopolitical and economic world spheres. Ultimately, this
study raises the question of whether it is possible to have independent research questions
and interests given the Western origins of most disciplines and the continued Western
dominance of the world, for now."
This critique of the insular character of the category of "gender" is followed by a
different kind of critique offered by historian of American religion Robert Orsi in his essay,
"Snakes Alive: Resituating the Moral in the Study of Religion." Orsi's essay opens with a
difficult example, one that probes the complex questions of subjectivity, perspective, and
value in the study of religion. A journalist, Dennis Covington, spent two years among
Christian snake handlers in Georgia, and produced what Orsi calls "a compelling account"
of this religious community in a book entitled Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling
and Redemption in Southern Appalachia. On his last night with the community, Covington
"watches in horror as his photographer, a young woman well known by then to the
handlers, is verbally assaulted-by a minister Covington has considered his spiritual fatherfor
her usurpation of man's scripturally mandated role (as the community understood this).
Covington rises to witness against this denial of spiritual equality to women, but he is
silenced by his mentor." Another preacher, with a large snake draped over his shoulder,
then begins to preach a "nasty, woman-hating sermon." Covington's account of this event
and his own response to it emphasize its strangeness, and his deep involvement in the
community is ruptured as he returns to the "normal" world he had occupied (as a New York
Times reporter) prior to spending two years amidst the snake-handlers. Orsi's essay raises
critical questions about how "otherness" is negotiated in the study of religion, and it does so
6
around a dramatic and troubling example concerning women's participation in religious life.
The essay goes on to offer some alternative examples of encountering "the other" in the
study of religion in which the writers risk their own subjectivity by opening themselves to "a
revisioning of one's own story through the lens of the other openly engaged." The essay's
embrace of such openness as well as of critical conversation in the work of moral inquiry
makes an important methodological intervention early on in the volume. It challenges
readers to think about questions of standpoint, objectivity, the boundaries between the
knower and the known, and what ethically engaged investigation might require.
Like Orsi's article, Minoo Moallem's "Transnationalism, Feminism, and
Fundamentalism" raises questions about identity and otherness in the study of gender and
religion. Taking as her starting point the current climate of globalization and the
paradoxical fragmentation of identities and identifications, Moallem observes that an
intensified conflict over representations is under way around the globe. In this context, the
categories of "feminism" and "fundamentalism" have emerged as opponents but also as
competitors in the contest over identity in the globalized, postmodern framework. As
Moallem puts it at the beginning of her essay, "Feminisms and fundamentalisms are now
competing global forces, both attempting to find means to control the mechanisms of
cultural representation. Both feminism and fundamentalism are major factors responsible
for and responding to the 'crisis of rationality' as well as the crisis of 'masculinity' and
'femininity.' Both arose inside the problematic of modernity as it deals with relations
between men and women with respect to the universal and the particular, public and
private, family and state, and individual and community." Examining how "Western
egalitarian feminism" and "Islamic fundamentalism" have been set in opposition (through
the more specific example of Iran), this essay seeks to undercut the colonialist dichotomy
embedded in the opposition itself. The precise examples from the Iranian revolution-the
masculinity of martyrdom and the femininity of the veil-show how gender has served the
production of idealized Islamic identities that contend with the impositions of Westernized
modernity. Yet, as Moallem demonstrates, in spite of its apparent rejection of modernity's
subject formations, Islamic fundamentalism cannot help but be constituted as a mirror
image of feminism. Meanwhile, feminism is also caught up in a reflective relationship with
fundamentalism-each "takes pleasure in what is prohibited to" the other. Moallem warns
that feminism must reconfigure itself in order to escape this double bind.
Part II, "Origins, Identities, and Appropriations," brings together a series of essays
that raise questions about originary narratives, religious identities, and the politics of
appropriation (whether for religious, political, or explicitly feminist ends). This section
draws attention to the nostalgic pleasures and dangers involved in the search for originsboth
in religion and in feminist critique. It also interrogates the political complexities
involved in utopian appropriations of "other" religions by those in search of an easy escape
from the patriarchal taint of received traditions.
Mieke Bal's "Sexuality, Sin, and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character"
is a reading of the Genesis 1-3 narrative of Adam and Eve in the garden. Bal's interpretation
of this foundational narrative has become a classic of feminist biblical scholarship. Using the
interpretive tools of narratological analysis and psychoanalytic criticism along with the
theoretical perspective of ideological critique, Bal provides a reading of the character of Eve
that challenges both the traditional misogynist reading and the apologetic feminist reading
of the text. This essay is included for several reasons: it explores the mythic and ideological
production of gender in what is clearly one of the foundational texts of the West (Genesis); it
is a good example of methodological sophistication in the application of literary theory to
7
religious texts in the service of an ideological critique; and it provides one of several
examples in the reader of how "the body" is produced through religious or mythic discourse.
Bal's essay simultaneously discusses a text that thematizes the problem of "origins"
and performs an interpretation of this originary text that illuminates the complexity of
attempts to appropriate such texts for projects of liberation.
The next essay in this discussion of origins and appropriations engages the ubiquity
of sacrifice as part of religious practice and ideology, a ubiquity that has long presented a
challenge to theoreticians of religion. How is it that the brutal shedding of blood should come
to occupy center:"stage in religious dramas? Why does the blood of sacrificial victims
possess such purifying potency? These are the questions that sociologist of religion Nancy
Jay seeks to answer in her groundbreaking study of sacrifice, "Sacrifice as Remedy for
Having Been Born of Woman." Paying attention to gender, Jay notices that there is a
striking "affinity between blood sacrificial religion and those social systems that make the
relation between f.1ther and son the basis of social order and continuity." Focusing on
ethnographic accounts of African societies, Jay traces out the patterns of social formation
that link sacrificial practice to patrilineal social order. She then turns her attention to what
she calls "the JudeoChristian sacrificial social organization." She examines the story of
Jacob's first sacrifice in Genesis 29-31, demonstrating how this story solves the problem of
genealogy and descent in the narrative. She then goes on to consider the prohibition in the
Catholic church against women serving as priests, observing the links between priesthood,
eucharistic sacrifice, and apostolic succession. Women are excluded from ordination
precisely in those Christian communities that maintain a strong sacrificial eucharistic
theology. As she interprets this social and institutional reality, Jay observes: "Both sides of
the controversy over women's ordination appear to share an understanding with sacrificing
patrilineage members around the world: recognition of the power of sacrifice as a ritual
instrument for establishing and maintaining an enduring male-dominated social order."
Jay's discussion intervenes in a broad debate among theoreticians of religion concerning the
origins and ongoing meanings of sacrifice. It also demonstrates beautifully the dramatic shift
that occurs when "gender" is used as a critical category of analysis-rendering a mystifying
and apparently arbitrary set of practices legible and intelligible.
Questions of religious identity take center stage in Zakia Pathak and Rajeswari
Sunder Rajan's" 'Shahbano,' " a case study involving a controversial and highly publicized
Supreme Court decision' in India in 1985. Shahbano was a divorced Muslim woman to
whom the court awarded financial maintenance (an amount equal to approximately $14 per
month) from her husband, who had sought to avoid such payment. Shahbano subsequently
denounced the Court's award in a statement in which she asserted, "Since this judgment is
contrary to the Quran and the hadith and is an open interference in Muslim personal law, I,
Shahbano, being a muslim, reject it and dissociate myself from every judgment which is
contrary to the Islamic Shariat." The political aftermath of the Court decision and
Shahbano's response to it included the passage of a bill a year later called the "Muslim
Women (Protection of Rights in Divorce) Act," a law whose ambiguous effects the essay
explores. The case, as can be seen from this discussion, involved much more than a monthly
payment from a man to his divorced wife. It came to stand for a wide range of conflicts
between secular law and religious law, between Muslims and Hindus in India, and between
different ideas about the subjectivity of "Shahbano," a figure who the authors of this essay
argue served as a discursive cipher in a complex cultural, religious, and political struggle.
How gender intersects with religious affiliations and class status complicates how this case
might be understood and, indeed, how "Shahbano" might be interpreted. That the case
8
came to be the stage upon which a conflict between two groups of men seemed to be enactedthe
stage on which male "protection" of female "victims" turned quickly to cliches,
stereotypes, and paternalism. This essay raises questions of subjectivity and appropriation,
of the relationship between "the religious" and "the secular," of the ways in which
apparently progressive institutional gestures can have unexpected and changeable effects on
those whose situations they seek to remedy. Shahbano's "inconstancy" is not, the authors
argue, the product of a stereotypical feminine proclivity to changeability, but rather emerges
out of the constraints experienced by "the female subaltern subject" who is "a palimpsest of
identities, now constituted, now erased, by discursive displacements." Hence, Shahbano 's
name appears in quotation marks in the title of the essay to signal the deferrals and
displacements of her subjectivity in the midst of these competing claims made upon her.
The problem of origins has repeatedly and recurrently troubled feminist interpreters
of religious traditions. Scholars and activists have often turned to "antiquity" both as the
place of origin-the historical locus of patriarchy's beginnings-and as the potential site of an
alternative history-the place from which alternative religious and cultural forms might be
retrieved. Contemporary goddess religions have often privileged the goddess traditions of
other historical periods and cultural! geographical locations in their search for a useable
past. In her essay, "A Question of Origins: Goddess Cults Greek and Modern," Greek
historian and classicist Helene Foley responds to this interest in her discussion here of the
work of two important contributors to the goddess movement, Starhawk and Carol Christ.
Her essay has two main parts: the first part examines the theoretical underpinnings of the
goddess religion movement; the second part looks at the ancient sources that have been
mined by the goddess religions. As Foley puts it, her "project reveals not only significant
misappropriation of ancient sources, but missed opportunities for a fuller understanding of
the religious project in which spiritual feminism has engaged." This essay raises a whole
series of important questions: What is at stake in the work of goddess feminism's attempts to
retrieve a prehistorical mythic framework for contemporary religious life? What are the
principles of selection at work in claiming a useable past from ancient sources? How does
the appeal to "origins" function, and what are the potentially double-edged political payoffs
of this utopian vision? Does the privileging of the traditionally feminine roles result in a
restorative valorizing of what has been traditionally denigrated-or does it instead reinscribe
traditional gender roles, albeit inverted in terms of the values assigned to them?
Laura Donaldson's "On Medicine Women and White Shame-ans: New Age Native
Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Culture Feminism" picks up on some of the
themes of the previous essay but with an additional political edge. New Age Native
Americanism-or NANA, as Donaldson abbreviates it-"has emerged as a powerful catalyst
for feminist transformation as non-Native women increasingly employ Indian traditions to
escape the patriarchal biases of monotheistic religions and to become empowered, as well . as
individuated." As Donaldson observes, this movement has connections with American selfhelp
movements and emerges from a notion of feminist transformation that is concerned
with the individual (rather than the social or the collective) and with therapeutic healing
(rather than with political and social change). Focusing in on the remarkable cultural
phenomena represented by popular works such as Lynn Andrews's Jagtlar Woman and
Clarissa Pinkola Estes's Women Who Run with the Wolves, Donaldson diagnoses their effects
as a combination of postmodern pastiche and commodity fetishism. Comparing this process
of misappropriation and commodification of indigenous religious traditions and forms of
knowledge to other dimensions of colonial "piracy," Donaldson recognizes that there are no
courts or other institutions where such cultural borrowing can be challenged or contested.
9
"The only remedy, it seems, is a demystification of this movement and an exposure of its
roots in the legacies of historical and neo-colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchal
capitalism. As a person of Cherokee descent, I can only say that women persisting in a quest
fulfilled at the expense of American Indians risk becoming nothing less than kidnappers who
falsely claim feminist ideology and who join the rest of those benefiting from the plunders of
imperialism in a New that is, postmodern neocolonial-Age."
Part III, "Gender and Religious Experience: Interdisciplinary Approaches,"
highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity in the study of gender and religion by
focusing broadly on the idea of "religious experience" and examining how it might be read
differently by literary critics, queer theorists, historians, psychoanalysts, and fieldworking
materialist anthropologists.
Situated at the beginning of this section is Carolyn Dinshaw's "Margery Kempe
Answers Back," a reading of gender and religious experience drawing upon literary studies,
queer history, and cultural studies. This essay transports readers to medieval England and a
world where heresy accusations intermingle with charges of hypocrisy, sexual deviance, and
social disruption-and Margery's controversial decision to wear white clothes. "Why might
Margery's sartorial practice evoke the suspicion that she intends to lead wives away from
their husbands and homes?" This question focuses readers on the themes that concern
Dinshaw throughout the book from which this essay is excerpted, Getting Medieval-themes
of queerness, community, and history. This essay offers a close reading of Margery Kempe's
testimony on her own behalf, in which she defends and explains her "excessive" love for
Jesus. The next part of the essay takes up the problem of the apparent marginality of "the
medieval" and "the queer" in a discussion set in yet a third setting-the U.S. Congress, where
funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities came under threat in 1997.
Invoking the spirit of Margery Kempe, Dinshaw offers a compelling defense of queer history
against the governmental anxiety that would silence research in this area by defunding it.
The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography written in English, is by all accounts a
"classic" text in the Western religious canon. And it also raises wonderfully complex
questions about gender, religious identity and experience, institutional and personal religious
authority, and personal and social compliance and resistance.
Religious experience, each of the authors in this section would argue, must be
radically historicized and contextualized. One example of the importance of this interpretive
practice can be seen in the emergence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in
England of two quite different discourses the scientific field of sexology and the religious
formation of Theosophy. In her historical account of the relationship between these two
modes of knowing, "Sexology and the Occult: Sexuality and Subjectivity in Theosophy's
New Age," Joy Dixon explores how theories of sexuality and religion during this period
struggled with each other for ascendancy in their attempts to account for the formation of
subjectivity and personhood. Dixon articulates her project in this way: "I would like to
explore an alternative trajectory in which-as psychics, mystics, or theosophists-men and
women ... influenced, assimilated, and reworked new sexological and psychoanalytic claims
regarding gender and sexuality into and through an elaborate constellation of spiritual
beliefs, beliefs that they claimed were also scientific, even though their occult science might
not be universally (or even very widely) recognized as such. Sexology may have triumphed
as an academically respectable way of knowing about sex in the twentieth century but, at the
time of its creation, it by no means held the field uncontested."
Theosophy was a very popular religious movement among England's elites, a
syncretistic movement that blended mysticism, occult science, and spiritual practices and
10
offered an alternative to the dominant religious and intellectual streams of thought
otherwise available. It was also tied to a range of social reform movements, from feminism to
socialism and anti-imperialism. Its relative social marginality-and endurance of the
concomitant accusations of sexual deviance and heresy-might be fruitfully read against
Margery Kempe's experiences five centuries earlier in England. Like Margery Kempe,
Theosophists "answered back" to their received traditions and found in their own, cobbledtogether
spiritual lives ways of expanding the frameworks that constructed and constrained
their (sexual) lives. Theosophy is particularly interesting for its ability to harness its
scientifico-spiritual insights into a livable defense of those whose gender identifications and
sexual desires did not fit easily into received models. Past-life stories enabled some
Theosophists to imagine a more complex (and not merely binary) relationship between
"masculine" and "feminine" and to assert a potentially liberating malleability of identity in
relation to the body. As Dixon puts it, "In the last analysis, it is perhaps not surprising that a
female theosophist might prefer to think of herself not as a neurotic, hysterical, or deviant
woman but as a Viking warrior who had only recently taken up residence in a woman's body
and on whom the 'restraints of [her] sex press so heavily.' "
American religious history has been an especially rich source of examples of ecstatic
religious experience and autobiographical reflection on such experiences. Among the most
important are the autobiographical writings of two African American women-Jarena Lee of
the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Rebecca Cox Jackson, who, although raised in
the A. M. E. Church, became a leader in the Shaker Community.18 Katherine Clay Bassard
offers a reading of Jackson's texts as ritual performances in her essay, "Rituals of Desire:
Spirit, Culture, and Sexuality in the Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson." Carefully
reconsidering the history of the relationship between Jarena Lee and Jackson, Bassard
argues that "the case of Rebecca Cox Jackson and Jarena Lee represents a dialectic of
difference occasioned by the mediation of abstract categories of identity-race, gender, class,
sexuality-by very concrete, identifiable differences arising from their investments in
competing religious discourses." Bassard analyzes Jackson's conversion story, "in which
biblical imagery of the giving of the Law at Mount Sinai is fused with imagery from Shan go,
a West African religious cult." The echoes of African religious ideas, Bassard argues,
highlight the diasporic quality of Jackson's ritual and religious life in which subjectivity,
culture, and spirituality continue to be shaped by historical experiences of exile and
displacement.
Bassard's reading of Jackson's writing as ritual and of her text as a negotiation of
sexual identity can be compared with Dinshaw's discussion of Margery Kempe and Dixon's
treatment of early-twentieth-century British Theosophists. All three essays, as well as the
two that follow, continue to raise questions about how religious experience intersects with
historical and social frameworks of possibility and constraint (including those of gender,
class, race, sexuality). Bassard's and Dinshaw's literary/historical studies offer two different
disciplinary approaches to the topic of gender and sexuality in relation to religious
experience.
Disciplinary differences continue to be highlighted by the essays that complete this
section of the book. In "The Woman Who Wanted to Be Her Father: A Case Analysis of
Dybbuk-Possession in a Hasidic Community," one of two essays concerning spirit
possession, Yoram Bilu details the story of a nineteenth-century Hasidic woman who came to
be possessed by the spirit of her father. Beginning by noting the methodological difficulties
involved in producing a case study out of evidence twice-removed from the original, the
author nevertheless undertakes to analyze the story of Eidel, daughter of Rabbi Shalom in
11
the Galician town of Brody. The essay deploys psychoanalysis to interpret the meanings
generated by Eidel's possession. Providing a brief survey of other possible interpretations of
spirit possession, the author situates the story of Eidel in this broader theoretical context,
and yet is careful to notice the particularities deriving from the Jewish (and, indeed, Hasidic)
framework within which the story unfolds.
"The Woman Who Wanted to Be Her Father" can fruitfully be read in concert with
Aihwa Ong's "The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in
Malaysia," which follows it. Ong's approach, based on her fieldwork among Malaysian
factory workers, emphasizes the economic resistance that spirit possession produces for
these working women. Taken together, the two essays suggest how possession works to
negotiate the contradictions and constraints of gender, religious, and class ideology in quite
different historical and geographical locations. Can religious experience be harnessed as a
mode of resistance against the pressures of capitalist domination? Ong answers this question
affirmatively.
"Possession" as a category within religious experience has always been a highly
charged term. As can be seen in "The Woman Who Wanted to Be Her Father,"
"possession" cannot be understood in the abstract, but must be set in a social, cultural, and
historical context in order to be rendered meaningful. Since I. M. Lewis's classic 1971 study,
Ecstatic Religion, it has been received wisdom that women are disproportionately
represented among the "possessed" for reasons that have now become almost cliched:
possession is more likely among those thought to be more spiritually and psychologically
open while possession is also a socially acceptable means for expressing and mediating distress.
Ong complicates this thesis by exploring the modes of resistance available to Muslim
Malaysian workers on the shop floor of modern factories. Unable to resist their
proletarianization in direct, political ways, the women's religious experiences express their
feelings of dislocation in the wake of globalized capitalism. "Spirit possession episodes may
be taken as expressions of both fear and of resistance against the multiple violations of moral
boundaries in the modern factory. They are acts of rebellion, symbolizing what cannot be
spoken directly, calling for a renegotiation of obligations between the management and
workers."
Ong's essay and the essay preceding it concerning dybbuk-possession work together as two
quite different disciplinary approaches to the complex experience of "possession" of women
by spirits. Whereas Bilu's article is staunchly psychoanalytic, Ong's brings an
anthropological critique of capitalism to bear on the experience of selves penetrated by the
spirits of others-with new subjectivities produced in the process.
Part IV, "Gender, Religion, and Body Politics," recognizes that the body has been a
central site for reflection on religious ideology and practice, and a place where questions of
gender, materiality, and power have been negotiated. Religion is often the discourse and
ideology through which societies negotiate their understandings of the body and by which
they create systems of regulation and constraint for the body. These processes are anything
but unitary, and they often intersect with other political motivations and interests. In this
section, the "body" signifies both individual human bodies and collective social bodies, and
the essays collected here illuminate the complexity of religious practices and meanings as
they come to be written on the body.
Jonah Steinberg's essay, "From a 'Pot of Filth' to a 'Hedge of Roses' (and Back):
Changing Theorizations of Menstruation in Judaism" takes up the question of purity in
Jewish law, observing that although the legal tradition surrounding women's menstruation
has remained "remarkably constant," the ideological constructions surrounding that
12
tradition "have undergone a near complete reversal." Whereas the rabbis of late antiquity
and the Middle Ages mobilized a rhetoric that portrayed a menstruating woman as a vessel
of disgust and a dangerous threat to the men around her, modern Jewish orthodoxy has
turned toward arguments that emphasize the physical and psychological well-being of
marriage partners who live by the rules constraining sexual intercourse during
menstruation. "Uniformly, the modern Orthodox literature concerning menstruation seeks
to obscure the earlier themes of revulsion and avoidance, stressing companionship and
intimacy even as it prescribes meticulous physical separation." Yet, as Steinberg goes on to
observe, "despite the aim of the 'family purity' manuals to appeal to modern sensibilities,
dubious and archaic claims concerning women's bodies, sexuality, and emotions, as well as
the dynamics of heterosexual monogamy, typify these new treatises on hilkhot niddah [the
purity laws concerning menstruation)."
Purity regulations exist in many religious traditions, and many cultures have complex
menstruation taboos that have been interpreted by anthropologists, both feminist and nonfeminist.
What is striking about Steinberg's analysis is the remarkable stability of the legal
tradition's proscriptions while the rationalizing arguments surrounding them can be so
varied and, indeed, flexible. As Steinberg puts it succinctly, "The prime requirement of the
Orthodox Jewish life is not understanding, or even faith. The fundamental demand is action,
practical observance." Hence, "purity" as a system can be open to multiple interpretations
and structures of meaning; what remains constant is the demand to observe its dictates.
Intense concern with bodily practices is, of course, not limited to religious systems
such as Orthodox Judaism. Such concern may be found dramatically expressed in one of the
more curious passages in the Christian New Testament, a section of the apostle Paul's first
letter to the Christian church in the Roman colonial city of Corinth. In this passage, Paul
insists upon a strictly differentiated gender system: when praying or prophesying, men's
heads must be uncovered and women's heads must be covered. The arguments for why this
must be the case include the hierarchical order of the cosmos, which is replicated in the
hierarchical order of creation, the order of nature itself, and the conventional practices of
other Christian churches. What is at stake in this insistent rhetoric by Paul? This is the
question Mary Rose D'Angelo seeks to answer in her essay, "Veils, Virgins, and the Tongues
of Men and Angels:
Women's Heads in Early Christianity," a carefully argued, detailed analysis of Paul's
rhetoric and that of his second-century North African reader and copolemicist, Tertullian.
Placing the dramatic rhetoric of these two early church fathers in cultural and ideological
context, D'Angelo brings into view some of the contentiousness and competition of the early
church. Both Paul and Tertullian are concerned with the religious experiences and
prophetic/visionary practices of unveiled women, and they mobilize arguments built upon
their own claims to authority and upon the unquestionable authority of antiquity in order to
rein in women's religious lives. As also seen in Part III on religious experience, anxieties over
spiritual ecstasy often generate sexual slander-and such slander can be found in both Paul
and Tertullian.
Why pay attention to such ancient-and, indeed, archaic-writers on the meanings of
women's bodies? As D'Angelo argues, "On many levels, the rhetorical excesses, the
overwrought moral rigor, and the ultimate schismatic bitterness of Tertullian make him an
easy mark. But it should not be forgotten that in the long run, both Tertullian and Paul won.
They won not only in terms of the literal imposition of veils and head-covering on women
and virgins for many centuries, but in the larger battle they saw themselves fighting over the
unveiled heads of women, the battle to shelter the divine and revelatory, the words of the
13
spirit and the eyes of the angels, from the sexualized presence of women . And they won too,
in that the women whose heads were at issue remain veiled against our inquiry, cloaked in
the male discourse that at once discloses and hides their presence. We cannot know the
meaning they gave their gestures, or the hopes and expectations that accompanied them.
These women are visible only through the eyes of the male controversialists, who do not see
them either, for they are mocked into the fascinum of their own eroticizing gaze."
Like menstruation, the veil is a complex and non-unitary sign. Mary Rose D'Angelo's
article on Paul and Tertullian traces the history of veiling practices among Christians and
argues that the practice of veiling is a male effort to control women and their sexuality. In
Homa Hoodfar's essay, "The Veil in Their Minds and on Our Heads: Veiling Practices and
Muslim Women," one encounters the practice of women's veiling in a different cultural
contextand with a different set of cultural constraints and meanings governing the practice
itself. Expressing her frustrations with Western biases against Islam which have,
interestingly, focalized upon the veil as the symbol of Islamic otherness-Hoodfar draws upon
a range of historical and fieldwork sources to make a more complex argument about the veil.
"I argue," she writes, "that the veil, which since the nineteenth century has symbolized for
the West the inferiority of Muslim cultures, remains a powerful symbol both for the West
and for Muslim societies. While for Westerners its meaning has been static and unchanging,
in Muslim cultures the veil's functions and social significance have varied tremendously,
particularly during times of rapid social change. Veiling is a lived experience full of
contradictions and multiple meanings. While it has clearly been a mechanism in the service
of patriarchy, a means of regulating and controlling women's lives, women have used the
same social institution to free themselves &om the bonds of patriarchy. Muslim women, like
all other women, are social actors, employing, reforming, and changing existing social
institutions, often creatively, to their own ends. The static colonial image of the oppressed
'veiled Muslim woman thus often contrasts sharply with the lived experience of veiling. To
deny this is also to deny Muslim women their agency."
Together, D'Angelo's and Hoodfar's articles raise complex questions about gender
constructions, ideological framings of the body, the role of religion as a transmitter of
culture and values, and the multiplicity of meanings available for interpreting and
understanding a single bodily practice. "The veil" is a highly charged flashpoint for
discussions of gender and religion and of the political valences attached to certain practices
that come to stand for "tradition" or "modernity." Consequently, these two essays offer two
very different readings of the stakes involved in arguments for and against the veil.
Another critical flashpoint at the intersection of religion, gender, and the body resides
in the realm of "politicized religion." Several articles take up this problematic in quite
different ways. In their essay, "Women Who Walk on Water: Working across 'Race' in
Women Against Fundamentalism," Clara Connolly and Pragna Patel enact a form of
coalition-building activism-two women from quite different social locations within latecapitalist
Britain, working together in an organization to counter the "modern political
movements that use religion as a basis for their attempt to win or consolidate power and
extend social control." The two writers use a number of concrete examples of struggles in
the postcolonial British context to demonstrate the complex (and sometimes contradictory)
intersections of such factors as race, sexuality, cultural citizenship, and immigration status
with gender and religion. In the process, the essay raises crucial theoretical questions about
at least three charged terms-"identity," "multiculturalism," and "secularism." This essay
can be read fruitfully in concert with Minoo Moallem's "Transnational ism, Feminism, and
14
Fundamentalism"-an essay that, among other things, troubles two additional categories:
"feminism" and "fundamentalism."
Patricia Jeffery's "Agency, Activism, and Agendas," meanwhile, focuses on women's
activism "on the ground" in South Asia as a response in recent years to the growing
politicized religion in the region. The essay urges readers to move beyond facile attributions
of the role of "victim" to South Asian women, and to focus instead on agency and activism
among these women. Exploring struggles over ideology and experience, the essay focuses on
a range of strategies and impulses that drive feminist movements around both local and
global concerns. Among the topics that are explored here are the varying effects of certain
discursive and ideological moves-the use of the category of "motherhood" and its religious
resonances (both in the connections between mothers and goddesses and in the iconization of
woman as mother), the mobilization of images of Hindu goddesses as emblems for gender
activism among women, the attempts to decenter politicized religion's claims to authority in
interpreting religious traditions, and so on. Feminist politics in these contexts are often
organized around women's interests in controlling their own bodies-from sexuality and
reproductive life to freedom of movement and other forms of resistance to bodily
subordination. Religion frequently offe~s an idiom for both feminists and antifeminists to
express their political arguments. How this is played out in the South Asian context is amply
demonstrated by this impressive essay, at once a survey of the field and a manifesto for
ongoing activism.
Of course, politicized religion is not limited to locations outside the United States, and
there are two essays in the volume that take up issues of body politics, gender, and religious
ideology and practice in the U.S. context. In her essay "Tender Warriors," literature scholar
Linda Kintz looks at the grassroots Christian men's movement and its particular
manifestation in groups like the Promise Keepers. Exploring the psychological, political, and
theological dimensions of their attempts to inscribe gender differences (grounded in a
particular reading of the Bible) onto the bodies of men and women, Kintz offers a
compelling and critical model for reading the rhetoric of popular Christian literature at the
present moment. Kintz closes with a discussion of how this particular Christian construction
of gender roles has made its way into legal arguments presented in U.S. courts in defense of
"religious freedom" and "the family."
In their essay "Getting Religion,"Janet R.Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini pick up where
Kintz leaves off by exploring the role of the category of "religion" in the workings of the
U.S. Supreme Court's actions in regulating sexuality in particular, homosexuality. Arguing
that" 'religious/secular' is a distinction without a difference," they explore what this
distinction enables and effaces in the discourses of the state around sexuality. Examining in
particular two cases, Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) and Romer v. Evalls (1996), the essay
traces how an idealized "secularism" is produced along with figurations of the
"homosexual." The Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Georgia sodomy statutes in
Bowers included Justice Burger's assertion: "Decisions of individuals relating to homosexual
conduct have been subject to state intervention throughout the history of Western
Civilization. Condemnation of those practices is firmly rooted in judaeo-Christian moral and
ethical standards." Such a claim de historicizes and naturalizes the complex character of
"Western" antiquity at the same time that it effaces the links between ancient religious
teachings on sexuality (which are canonized here) and ancient religious teachings on dietary
purity (which are routinely ignored as outdated or irrelevant) or teachings on gender
hierarchy (which are at least widely contested). The point here is that the ways in which
"religion" is mobilized in the monitoring and regulation of certain forms of sexuality by the
15
state are relevant to thinking about the relationship between "religion," the "body," and
"gender." This essay also reminds us that "politicized religion," a term from Patricia
Jeffery's essay, is a relevant analytic category in the American context-especially useful for
understanding the invocation of religion in the purportedly secular framework of the state's
highest judicial body.
Part V, "Gender and Religion in the Politics of the Academy," brings this volume to a
close with Judith Plaskow's sobering assessment of the state of gender and feminism in the
academic study of religion in her 1998 Presidential Address to the American Academy of
Religion, "The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms in the Study of
Religion." Tracing the history of the emergence of feminist and gender studies in religion
within the main professional organization for scholars of religion, Plaskow develops a
narrative in· which changes in the Academy mirror changes in the society more broadly.
Tracking the changes in the AAR from her days as a graduate student in religion to the
moment of her election as its president, Plaskow discusses how the AAR has (in some places)
yielded to intense political pressure to transform itself from a Protestant men's club into a
more diverse and representative intellectual body. At the same time, she cautions readers
about the shifting economics of academia. It isn't only that job security and benefits in the
form of tenure are eroding. The university also continues to embrace an increasingly
corporate business model, filling its classrooms with exploited adjunct and part-time faculty.
All of this happens at the same time that capitalism itself emerges as a more compelling
religious system than those that long predated it. Urging her hearers not to capitulate to the
cliched bifurcation between "the academy" and "real life," Plaskow insists that the study of
religion-now transformed in critical ways by feminism and other cognate activismsrecognize
its place in "the real world" and reject a self-understanding that would divorce it
from that real world's many struggles.
Because of the constraints of space and as a result of the different stages of
development of scholarship in the field, this book provides coverage of very specific
geographical areas and only a small sampling of religious traditions. For example, South
Asia has been the site of extremely important work at the intersections of gender, politics,
and religion and is, as a consequence, well represented in the volume. Meanwhile,
scholarship on religion in East Asia China and Japan, in particular-is only now turning its
attention in a theoretically sophisticated way to questions of gender. Moreover, the focus is
overwhelmingly on the northern hemisphere of the globe so that Latin America and
Australia are not represented here. Finally, since "gender" appears prominently in the title,
it is important to acknowledge that the book does not reflect a strictly enforced gender
balance, although a significant number of the essays included in the volume address issues of
masculinity either obliquely or substantively (Orsi, Moallem, Bal, Jay, Dixon, Bilu, Kintz).
The fact of the matter is that feminist work in religion, focused as it has been more on
women than on gender, is simply at a more advanced stage of development than the newer
field of masculinity studies. The inevitable exclusions that are necessary in compiling an
anthology represent difficult editorial choices, and they are the product of the decision to try
to keep the book as theoretically focused and thematically coherent as possible.
This is a book that was envisioned from the start as having multiple audiences. The essays
compiled here raise complex theoretical questions for specialists in the field, but they also
provide the newcomer to feminist academic study of religion with many points of entry. We
have hoped that the book will contribute to many different conversations taking place in a
wide range of locations - the university seminar room, the academic conference hall, the coffee
house, even the dinner table. For academics and activists who work outside of the
16
academic study of religion, we hope this book will issue an invitation to look more closely at
the contentious and complex world of religion as it is inflected in relation to gender
ideologies and lived, embodied social experiences. For specialists in the field of religious
studies, we hope the essays collected here will make a strong argument for heightened
interdisciplinarity in the study of religion and for the importance of politically and ethically
engaged scholarly work in our collective enterprise. We also hope that this book will help
promote the radical paradigm shift that a generation of feminist work in the field has
produced so that this work might achieve the recognition it rightfully deserves. Finally, we
hope this book will contribute to a broader effort, undertaken in many different institutional
locations and by many different people, to press the field to transform its practices of
teaching and research in light of the foundational challenge that feminist scholarship
embodies.