Full Description
Gender, Religion and Diversity provides an introduction to some of the most challenging perspectives in the contemporary study of gender and religion. In recent years, women's and gender studies have transformed the international study of religion through the use of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural methodologies, which have opened up new and highly controversial issues, challenging previous paradigms and creating fresh fields of study. As this book shows, gender studies in religion raises new and difficult questions about the gendered nature of religious phenomena, the relationship between power and knowledge, the authority of religious texts and institutions, and the involvement and responsibility of the researcher undertaking such studies as a gendered subject. This book is the outcome of an international collaboration between a wide range of researchers from different countries and fields of religious studies.
The range and diversity of their contributions is the very strength of this book, for it shows how gendering works in studying different religious materials, whether foundational texts from the Bible or Koran, philosophical ideas about truth, essentialism, history or symbolism, the impact of French feminist thinkers such as Irigaray or Kristeva, or again critical perspectives dealing with the impact of race, gender, and class on religion, or by deconstructing religious data from a postcolonial critical standpoint or examining the impact of imperialism and orientalism on religion and gender.
Contents
Contributors and Editors; Preface and Acknowledgements; General Introduction - Ursula King, University of Bristol; Part I: Theoretical Perspectives; Introduction to Part I - Tina Beattie, University of Surrey Roehampton; 1. Where Have We Been? Where Do We Need to Go?: Women's Studies and Gender in Religion and Feminist Theology, - Rita M. Gross, University of Wisconsin Eau Claire; 2. Postcolonial and Gendered Reflections: Challenges for Religious Studies, - Morny Joy, University of Calgary; 3. Rethinking Subjectivity in the Gender-Oriented Study of Religions: Kristeva and the 'Subject-in-Process', - Sian Hawthorne, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; 4. On Understanding that the Struggle for Truth is Moral and Spiritual, - Harriet A. Harris, Wadham College, Oxford; 5. Religious Identity and the Ethics of Representation: The Study of Religion in the Secular Academy, - Tina Beattie; 6. Raced and Gendered Perspectives: Towards the Epidermalization of Subjectivity in Religious Studies Theory, - Mary Keller, University of Stirling; Part II: Historical and Textual Perspectives; Introduction to Part II, - Tina Beattie; 7. From Women's History to Feminist Theology: Gender, Witness and Canonicity in the Religious Narration of the Holocaust, - Melissa Raphael, Gloucestershire University; 8. Rethinking Religion in Gender History: Historiographical and Methodological Reflections, - Sue Morgan, University College Chichester; 9. The Gendering of Missionary Imperialism: The Search for an Integrated Methodology, - Gulnar Eleanor Francis-Dehqani, Independent Scholar - formerly at the University of Bristol; 10. Gender Archaeology and Paleochristianity, - Diane Treacy-Cole, University of Bristol; 11. 'Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus': On the Relationship between Religion, Gender and Space, - Jorunn Okland, Universities of Sheffield and Oslo; 12. Biblical Gender Strategies: The Case of Abraham's Masculinity, - Deborah Sawyer, University of Lancaster; Part III. Cultural and Contextual Perspectives; Introduction to Part III, - Tina Beattie; 13. Who are the Muslims? Questions of Identity, Gender and Culture in Research Methodologies, - Anne Sofie Roald, University of Malmo, Sweden; 14. Reflexive Transformations: Research Comments on Me(n, Feminist Philosophy and the Thealogial Imagination, - Paul Reid-Bowen, Gloucestershire University; 15. Why Difference Matters: Lesbian and Gay Perspectives on Religion and Gender, - Sean Gill, University of Bristol; 16. Indian Dalit Women and the Bible: Hermaneutical and Methodological Reflections, - Monica Melanchthon; 17. Race, Gender, Class and the Theology of Empowerment: An Indian Perspective, - Mukti Barton, Queen's College, Birmingham; 18. An Asian Postcolonial and Feminist Methodology: Ethics as a Recognition of Limits, - Sharon Bong, University of Lancaster and Malaysia; 19. Whose Face in the Mirror? Personal and Postcolonial Obstacles in Researching Africa's Contemporary Women's Theological Voices - Carrie Pemberton, Independent Scholar (formerly at Cambridge University); Index.
