Editors’ Introduction
Over the past year, we have heard different commentators remark that this is a new world. We understand this statement as a long overdue recognition of how anthropocentric acts of political extremism, racism, global health disparities, climate change, colonialism, and digital technological expansion have affected the world. The contributions to this volume unpack these impacts at the intersection of gender and religions. The authors question dominant male interpretations of politics, law, sacred texts, and religious practices. Across various international contexts and different religious traditions, they share strategies of resistance and practices of solidarity using social media, hermeneutics, care ethics, teaching, and art.
Each fall issue of the JFSR features the article submissions for the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Awards, which encourage and recognize emerging voices to foster the next generation of scholars in feminism and religious studies. This year’s recipients offer a rich diversity of method and feminist religious commitments. The first prize is awarded to Thuy Anh Tran and Chaya Halberstam for their article “‘I Think God Is a Feminist.’” Employing a traditional approach to gender analysis and women’s religious authority, they explore, through first-person interviews, the use of art as a tool of resistance for Orthodox Jewish women artists. Their clear, substantive, and well-argued article uplifts women’s feminist response in often overlooked conservative traditions. Slava Greenberg, in a pro- vocative and innovative essay that earned second place, analyzes the Amazon web series Transparent from a trans and gender-nonconforming contemporary Jewish perspective. Greenberg’s “Run from Your Parent’s House” centers a transfeminist reading of Abraham. Contemporary media can reinforce or change gendered religious stereotypes. In the third-place article, “Companion Sex Robots,” Michelle Wolff delves into the possible feminist care ethics repercussions of digital technological change when robots take over the majority of companion labor. Wolff relies on womanist ethics to forward a neoliberal critique of the social impact of outsourcing gendered and sexualized labor.
Rounding out the first section of this issue are two additional articles that home in on hegemonic masculine interpretations and their epistemic violence. In “Reintegrating the Feminine Voice Inherent in Sikh Scripture,” Jaspreet Bal and Santbir Singh Sarkar Daman draw on their collective four decades of experience as Sikh practitioners and community organizers to root out internalized misogyny that erases the feminine voice in the Guru Granth Sahib. They use a direct content analysis method to return to the feminine voice in Sikh scripture as a form of resistance. Shadaab Rahemtulla and Sara Ababneh deploy masculinities studies and a history of the present method to question the “ideal” Muslim marriage with a renewed focus on the marriage of Prophet Muhammad and Khadija. “Reclaiming Khadija’s and Muhammad’s Marriage as an Islamic Paradigm” provides an alternative to dominant Muslim marital ethics and law toward a more gender egalitarian partnership.
The Living It Out section continues to outline methods for resistance and detail acts of solidarity at the intersection of gender and religion in the face of global political exploitation. The coronavirus pandemic has heightened health, racial, economic, and political disparities across the world. Lauren McGrow invites the reader to consider through a body theology interpretation the impact of these disparities on bodies, ours and others. She describes COVID-19 using metaphors like concierge, trickster, dancer, and runner to show the vulnerability and agency present in the body’s experience of the pandemic. She writes, “On an interpersonal level, bodily identity is being radically altered as we see each other as contagious. . . . Yet it is the tender care and touch of embodied connection that give us resources for survival, flourishing, and justice” (105). Attention to embodiment evidences the particularity of each body while also highlighting cultural constructions of identity often used to oppress and discriminate. These same constructions can also be lived experiences of solidarity leveraged in protest. The next Living It Out contribution is a collection of essays first presented at the International Communication Association 2020 Digital South Asia Preconference. The “Performing Gender and Ethics of Care through Digital Protests and Protest Archiving” panel focused on the 2019–2020 protest movement in India against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC), and National Population Register (NPR). Each contribution chronicles how protest movements are mediated in physical and digital spaces, providing greater visibility for women in the global South. With increased agency through social media platforms, the authors detail how protestors and marginalized groups use social media platforms to transgress religious and gendered social limitations through solidarity and practices of care ethics.
The shifting digital landscape requires thoughtful considerations for activists in the streets as well as teachers in the classroom. In Short Takes, Ashley Bacchi notes, “As a white, intersectional, interdisciplinary, feminist historian in the United States who specializes in the ancient Mediterranean world, when I create syllabi, I frequently ask, How can I make a temporally, physically, and culturally distant world matter to my students?” (167). She is joined by a group of white US and German scholars in biblical studies, early Christianity, and historical studies discussing how they foster intersectional and dialogical classroom practices in digital and on-campus classrooms. Expressing a shared sentiment among the contributors, Davina Lopez acknowledges that “the study of religion is frequently porous and always political” (187). These scholars consider how their pedagogies combat anti-Black racism and white supremacy while focusing on the underlying goals and overarching theories that matter most in their pedagogical approaches. The Short Takes section brings together current events and historic content in ways that open critical spaces of engagement for students.
The issue concludes with a conversation on Celene Ibrahim’s 2020 book Women and Gender in the Qur’an in which the reader is once again invited into a conversation with contributors about pressing issues of religion, gender, and politics. Each of the five respondents focus on a chapter of the book to provide greater focus and extended commentary. Aayah Musa likens Ibrahim’s book “to rain on parched land” (191) for the way it centers Muslima hermeneutics and the Muslim female exegete. Hadia Mubarak notes how Ibrahim’s question—“If I were not invested in the outcomes and implications of the study—beyond mere curiosity or the quest for highbrow prestige—what motivation would remain?”— is highly relevant for our polarized times. Mubarak writes, “For those of us who occupy the invisible spaces between the Eastern and Western divide, we are eminently aware of our state of ‘double consciousness.’ To whom are we speaking and what interests does our scholarship serve? Without asking these questions of ourselves, we risk the possibility of becoming entangled in the very structures of power that we critique” (205). Similar questioning of scholarly purpose and relevance is present across this issue. The variety of coauthored articles and collaborative conversations demonstrates accountability and shared learning in the production of knowledge. Feminist studies in religion is at its best when grounded in community, dialogue, and collaboration through recognition of differences, not in spite of them or in service of erasure. The authors in this issue mine social media, hermeneutical method, popular media, practices of care, teaching, and art to bring forth strategies of resistance and practices of solidarity as they resist becoming entangled in the very structures of power they critique.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jfemistudreli.37.2.01