Editors’ Introduction

This issue of the journal highlights the comparative nature of the field of feminist studies in religion. In addition to articles and poetry, readers will find three conversations among scholars. Together they approach an issue from their distinct perspectives. Authors learn with and from one another as they think anew about their own interests. It is some of the best kind of work in the academy, where a group of scholars approaches intransigent issues together, in the hope that they can use different lenses to provide new answers to old questions. We hope the rich conversations in this issue will generate new ideas, questions, and answers for you as well.

Each year, we honor submissions from scholars who are less than four years postgraduation with the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award (NSA). This year's winner of the NSA is Magda Mohamed. "Queer Muslim Piety" explores queer Muslim women's attitudes toward their hijab. Mohamed's important ethnographic research with queer Muslims disaggregates the hijab and female modesty from heteronormative sexual attraction.

Other articles submitted for this award include Emma McDonald's "Finding the Maternal Divine in the Contextual Realities of Motherhood" and Eliana Ah-Rum Ku's "Challenging Texts with Violence toward Women." McDonald argues for a new exploration of maternal metaphors for God in Catholic and Protestant theology. These new metaphors, McDonald demonstrates, can be drawn from more diverse experiences of motherhood than those that have historically been incorporated into divine imagery. Eliana Ah-Rum Ku's article also attends to the voices of those not often heard. Ku reads challenging texts through a postcolonial feminist framework and argues that this approach allows readers to witness suffering and lament alongside injustice.
Following the new scholar essays, this issue features two conversations among scholars. These formats reflect our feminist commitment to engage in challenging conversations and promote a multiplicity of opinions. Additionally, the conversations in these pages are continuations of dialogues started many years ago. Readers will enjoy seeing how the discourse has shifted and grown.

In the first roundtable, twelve feminist scholars of the Qurʾan discuss influential methodologies and promising new directions in gender-attuned research in qurʾanic studies. These scholars are expanding a conversation from seven years prior in JFSR 32.2, when scholars published a roundtable on feminist discourse in Islamic studies. This group of twelve scholars collaborated on a roundtable at the International Qurʾanic Studies Association (IQSA) 2022 conference in Palermo, Italy, and subsequently published their conversation in our pages. This roundtable reflects the many ways the feminist study of the Qurʾan has expanded to include extra-qurʾanic corpora, critique of masculinity, and spirituality, among others.

Poetry submissions editor Chloe Martinez selected two poems to feature in this issue's In a Different Voice section. Chloe remarked, "In Benjamin Bagocius's poems in this issue we see Yeshua's inexorable destiny re-imagined as a soccer ball floating 'big and soft' toward him, while the anonymous Canaanite woman gets an 'invisible structure,' a place for us to memorialize her as a figure of persistent love and faith. I appreciate the gentleness with which these poems intertwine modern experiences with biblical literature, discovering along the way moments of surprise, agency, and wonder."

The next conversation in this issue is a panel that originally took place at the American Academy of Religion conference in 2022. We are grateful to Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier and Grace Ji-Sun Kim, officers of Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR), for organizing this panel. This panel served as a continuation of FSR's commitment to examine how our work engenders and is undergirded by white supremacy and Christian hegemony. Tiemeier and Kim were inspired by Nami Kim's essay in JFSR 38.1, a special issue of the journal wherein our officers and board members reflected on FSR's past and the importance of change. In the current panel, Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Vijaya Nagarajan, Rachel A. R. Bundang, Najeeba Syeed, and Tamara C. Ho reflect on anti-Asian racism and Asian invisibility in society, in the academy, and in the feminist study of religion.

Our issue ends with "A Special Section on Feminism in the Abrahamic Religions." As a set, these four articles provide a fruitful comparison of the ways women in several religious traditions make "patriarchal bargains" (Alinat-Abed), "leverage" (Rosman), negotiate, and use several other tactics in order to "be welcome in their spiritual homes" (Haker).

Salwa Alinat-Abed's "Multiple Faces of the Same Coin: Religious Muslim Women in Israel Struggle with an Identity Crisis," explores the "patriarchal bargains" used by female activists within the Islamic Movement in Israel. Drawing on qualitative interviews, Alinat-Abed argues that these bargains enable women to gain power. Next, in an essay titled "Censorship, Silence, and the Voices of Catholic Feminist Theologians," Haker looks at the many ways that the Catholic Church has censored feminist theologians and women's experiences of sexual violence. This silencing results in shame, as Haker notes: "Having the 'wrong' sex or gender, the 'wrong' sexual orientation, the 'wrong' sexual identity, or having been injured in our bodily and moral integrity" (170). Elisheva Rosman writes in "Tools, Masters, and Houses" about Jewish women in Israel and the Netherlands, and Muslim women in the Netherlands. Rosman introduces their strategy of leveraging the state to force the religious establishment to accede to their requests. Finally, Lisa Anteby-Yemini's article compares and contrasts how Orthodox Jewish and Muslim women confront the male hegemony of religious authority within their respective traditions. Anteby-Yemini's comparative study is unique in the field, and it reflects the overall approach of this special section.

Before wrapping up, we want to make note of a correction. In issue 39.1, the article titled "Tārā, Cundā, and Their Prototypes: Exploring the Origins of the Two Buddhist Goddesses" misgendered the scholar Gurmeet Kaur. We were alerted to the mistake by the author, Juyan Zhang, and we have made the change in the online version of the article.

Stable URL: https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908291
Back To: Volume 39 Number 2