The 30th Anniversary Roundtable on JFSR: “Making a Material Difference”

“Making a Material Difference”

By Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre

From the 30th Anniversary Roundtable on JFSR: Volume 30, no. 2:

I have a vivid memory of entering the room for my first meeting for JFSR. Around the long conference table were many people, some of whom I knew and others I did not, though I was familiar with their work: Katie Cannon, María Pilar Aquino, Judith Plaskow, Mary Hunt, Kwok Pui-Lan. Although I was joining the organization as the new JFSR coeditor, because of my own scholarly and political interests, I was entering a community of which I was already a part. The journal and its website reflect this community and are the result of [151] networks of people who place a high priority on feminist knowledge and social transformation in their scholarship and teaching. This is one of the main ways that the scholarship published in JFSR makes a difference: it creates and sustains a material space—whether in print or digital form—for expressly feminist scholarship to be called forth, critically cultivated, multiply represented and contested, and consistently produced for scholarly and pedagogical use. We build the space, and it builds us.

We do not usually know it at the time, but JFSR produces what will become signal essays for its many fields. For my work, Shelly Matthews’s “Thinking of Thecla: Issues in Feminist Historiography” was just that kind of piece.¹ Attuned to the impact of the linguistic turn on the study of early Christian women and the rise of gender criticism on an expressly feminist approach to history, Matthews pressed readers to consider what is at stake in our scholarly work and to be vigilant about the use of theorists in ways that skew their insights to support particular ends. Pieces like Matthews’s not only challenge scholars to think about the epistemological effects of their work, they also help students figure out where to situate themselves in a complex conversation. 

JFSR is a place where difficult conversations among and across differences can be staged and engaged. In the 2004 roundtable on anti-Judaism and postcolonial biblical interpretation, Amy-Jill Levine raised the question to a range of international feminist scholars about how postcolonial scholarship on Jesus and early Christianity often reflects familiar anti-Jewish tropes such as figuring Jesus as someone who saves Jewish women from patriarchal Judaism.² Reading between the lines of this roundtable, one clearly sees that it could not have been an easy conversation—and there are many moments in which it is unclear whether the participants were fully hearing each other. Nonetheless, it is a powerful testament to the multilocational and intersectional realities of feminist and womanist work. JFSR does not, and should not, promote or pretend to create harmony. Rather it should continue to be a place where different perspectives and questions are routinely present, critically engaged with each other, and even left unresolved or in tension.

The journal also materially represents the ways in which feminist work changes in light of new challenges, world events, and concerns from each generation of scholars. Taken together, the womanist roundtables in 1989 and 2006 provide a glimpse of changing conversation partners and interests as issues of sexuality and religious difference emerge in the later roundtable [152] alongside the persistence of certain concepts and values.³ The roundtable on the “Muslimwoman” was generated in the post-9/11 environment in which the hijab and the veiled Muslim woman became iconic symbols of East/West relations and political difference.⁴ The publication of that roundtable also heralded the significant increase in scholars who engaged Islam from various feminist perspectives and modes of inquiry. In this way, the journal is a crucial place for both shaping scholarly conversations in relation to world events and for tracking the shifts and trends in the feminist study of religion that are partially a result of them.

Working as the coeditor of JFSR gave me a prolonged exposure to the significant challenges facing the production, distribution, preservation, and continuing engagement with expressly feminist and womanist scholarly work in the academy both in the United States and globally. To ensure a future material space for feminist studies in religion, I believe it is critical to maintain and increase expressly feminist and womanist faculty positions in the academy so that they can routinely offer courses in which students learn the language of the field and foster their own feminist scholarly voices. Given the explosion of information and the pressures for access—both beyond copyright and across the globe—it is also crucial for feminist studies in religion to cultivate and promote multiple modes of scholarly communication, robustly fostering both peer-reviewed scholarship and scholarly writing for nonexpert audiences. Finally, with the increased online connectivity of academic life, in-person and embodied interaction, collaboration, and networks become, in my opinion, more, not less, important. Gathering our resources and energies to create an Association of Feminist Studies in Religion, for example, would routinely materialize the conversations that already exist and build the collegial relationships so central to organizing the new projects that will continue to cultivate and connect future generations of scholars, teachers, and activists. If we continue to build the space, it will continue to build us. Happy thirtieth JFSR!