Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF WOMENS STUDIES, 2003

The Routledge Global History of Feminism, 2022

This article dispels the idea of incompatibility between feminism and religion. To that end, it argues that the intersection of feminism and religion mirrors the diverse ways in which religious folk interpret scripture, perform devotional rituals, inhabit religious institutions, and transform their societies. The first section addresses some key debates and methodologies. The next section examines how religious feminists have acknowledged certain problematic elements in their faith traditions, on the one hand, and how feminist scholars have studied the interplay among religion, power, and Western feminism, on the other hand. The third section discusses the provincialization of secular feminism on the part of historians, feminist theologians, and anthropologists of religion. The penultimate section sheds light on the centering of goddesses and female role models and focuses on the writings of Delores S. Williams and Vasudha Narayanan. The final section examines how feminist theologians appropriate religious authority through scriptural hermeneutics and women’s leadership in religious communities.

This article is a genealogy of feminism and feminist approaches to the study of religion. It is genealogical in the sense that I wish to speak to the development of feminist theorizing and its engagement in the work of feminists in the study of religion. To do this I first provide a processual narrative or locating the “events” of feminism (proposing series rather than unity) in the conditions of possibility that allowed for the acceptance of feminist “waves” one through three, as they are often times referred. The conditions of possibility are, as Michel Foucault wrote, “particular stages of [social] forces” (1984, 83) that support, either positively or negatively the discourse(s). In my development of a genealogy of feminism, I consider some successes, but also important prohibitions in feminist discourses, and their manifestation in the feminist narratives generated in the study of religion. These prohibitions, or places where feminist voices sometimes cease, are important to make apparent if only to remind ourselves feminists too have not arrived at the end of history.

Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 2005

Feminist scholarship in religion began with the first wave of the women’s movement in the nineteenth century, but became much more extensive with the second-wave women’s movement in the 1970s. This scholarship first explored women’s religious experiences, and then began to investigate the relationships between gender and religion more broadly, what Ursula King has described as a ‘double paradigm shift’. It is now clear that without using gender as an analytical category, religion can no longer be fully described or evaluated. Gender issues permeate religion in very complicated ways, manifesting themselves at levels from the local to the universal, and gender also intersects with other categories of analysis such as race, class, or ethnicity. Gendered study of religion and feminist theology have had a great impact on both scholarship and religious practice, though less impact on the development of main/malestream theology than one might have hoped. The full evaluation of the intersec...

Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 2011

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 1998

Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory, 2014

2005