The 30th Anniversary Roundtable on JFSR:”At Thirty I Took My Stand”

When the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion began in 1985, it provided a forum for scholars, activists, and members of various feminist religious movements to exchange ideas and develop feminist scholarship. JFSR has reached an important milestone at thirty years old; as Confucius said in The Analects, “at thirty I took my stand.”¹ Today, JFSR is the preeminent journal in the field and continues to promote scholarship and conversations across disciplines, religious affiliations, geographical boundaries, theoretical differences, and political affinities. 

I had the privilege of serving as coeditor of JFSR with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza from 2000 to 2005. Together, we edited the twentieth-anniversary issue for fall 2005. I look back and reflect on how the journal and feminist scholarship in religion have changed in the intervening years. It was in the early 2000s that the American Theological Library Association approached JFSR to be one of the first fifty journals archived in the ATLA Serials project—an online full-text collection of major religion and theology journals. Shortly after we agreed to this, Indiana University Press became the publisher of JFSR and the journal came out in both print and electronic forms.

 At the time, we were concerned about how the availability of the electronic format would affect print subscription. Today, the publishing environment has changed greatly and many continue to worry how long printed magazines and newspapers will survive. As for JFSR, the number of electronic subscriptions far exceeds that of print subscriptions. Many libraries have only electronic subscriptions to journals to save valuable space and make the journals more accessible. Full text of JFSR is also available in databases, such as Academic Search Premier, Project Muse, and JSTOR.

The availability of JFSR and other journals in electronic format has made my research much easier than before. With a click, I can search for author, subject, and title in the various databases. No longer do I need to go to the library as often as before, and I become impatient when material I need is not instantly available. It becomes a burden when I need to take extra effort to find it.

Although I also receive a print subscription of JFSR, I access articles electronically more often. The advantage of using the electronic format is that I can easily search for articles on a topic and go deeper into the discussion. The disadvantage is that I lose the breadth and the pleasure of discovering something I am not looking for, which comes as a result of browsing.

It is amazing to see how, in the past thirty years, the Internet and infor- [156] mation technology has changed our way of doing research. Then, when I was a graduate student, so much of my time was used to look for relevant resources; today, e-books and e-journals allow for greater and faster access. Whether the Internet has made us shallow or smart is an ongoing debate.² But what is required of a researcher has changed. We need to develop a critical judgment of what sources are reliable, cultivate what Howard Gardner calls a “synthesizing mind” to integrate so much material,³ and learn to work collaboratively across time and space through crowdsourcing, social media, and Skype or Google Hangouts. I am curious to know what kind of feminist scholarship will emerge in the next generation who are digital natives, born into world of the Internet and digital media.⁴

The availability of JFSR in electronic format and searchable databases makes it more accessible for our international readers. The journal always welcomes submissions from international scholars and has formed an international board to network with feminist scholars in other parts of the world. A welcoming trend is that JFSR has seen a growing number of submissions by scholars from the Middle East and the Global South. Some of these authors live in countries with limited library resources, and even smaller collections of feminist works. They may also live in a place where feminist scholarship is at a beginning stage and lack mentors and teachers to help them hone their research skills. Their research interests, feminist assumptions, and methodologies may be different from those in North America. Some of the topics we can easily talk about in North America may also be taboo in their situations. For all these reasons, the review of these articles requires care, thoughtfulness, and cultural sensitivity.

Justin E. H. Smith writes in the New York Times about Western bias in the field of philosophy and the need to open up the discipline to so-called non-Western traditions and perspectives.⁵ In the field of religion, scholars are generally aware of the need to include diverse religious traditions in the curriculum, since the academic study of religion began in the nineteenth century as comparative study of religion. The question for us is how to avoid Western bias in the study of these non-Western traditions. Some books on these traditions are written with Orientalist frameworks and Eurocentric biases. It is important for the next wave of feminist studies in religion to develop transnational and interdisciplinary scholarship for mutual critique. [157]

Twenty years ago, I was one of the few feminist scholars in religion interested in postcolonial studies and criticism. When Laura E. Donaldson and I coedited Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse in 2002, we had a hard time locating suitable contributors.⁶ Today, I am glad to see that an increasing number of feminist scholars have adopted postcolonial criticism in their work. More and more scholars share postcolonial concerns, though they may not explicitly engage postcolonial theory. A cursory reading of the list of titles published in the JFSR in the past ten years reveals the breadth of engagement with postcolonial criticism. For example, Joseph A. Marchal analyzes the imperial intersections in Philippians in the Bible from a feminist, postcolonial lens; Kathleen McPhillips speaks about gathering wo/men in the postcolonial Pacific region; Michelle Lelwica and her coauthors discuss the spread of the religion of thinness from California to Calcutta; I write on Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s contribution to postcolonial studies; Sylva Marcos discusses decolonizing religious beliefs in Mesoamerican women’s indigenous spirituality; and Erin Runions writes about political theology after Gayatri Spivak.⁷ These articles have the terms postcolonial or decolonizing in their titles. Many others touch on postcolonial themes without using these words in their titles, such as Katie Geneva Cannon’s essay on “Christian Imperialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.”⁸

The twentieth-anniversary issue contained a special section celebrating the occasion. Judith Plaskow contributed an essay on “A Short History of JFSR.”⁹ At the end, she thanked the extraordinary hardworking students who have served as managing editors, members of the board, and many scholars who reviewed articles and provided mentoring for others, even though some of the articles are not accepted in the end. As I look back to thirty years of feminist scholarship in religion and the role JFSR has played in it, I want to express my heartfelt [158] gratitude to Judith Plaskow and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza for their vision to begin the journal and for their commitment to nurturing junior scholars and graduate students in so many ways.

1. This much-quoted passage by Confucius on developmental milestones is from The Analects, Book 2:4. The verse has been variously translated. I follow D. C. Lau’s translation, which is closest to the original. See Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Dorset Press, 1986), 63.