Editors’ Introduction

A key methodological aspect of feminist studies in religion revolves around "the question of who has the authority to define the center" (198). Bernadette Brooten remarks that this question has occupied her work before and following the publication of Love Between Women. The issue begins and ends honoring two forces within feminist studies in religion that became authorities in redefining the center–Rosemary Radford Ruether and Brooten's Love Between Women. These scholars and their writings, like the articles in this volume, seek to make visible the power structures that shape historic and contemporary ideologies of sexuality, age, race, and gender in relation to sacred text, archival research, and religious participation.

Jane Dempsey Douglass kindheartedly shares her reflection on the impact and legacy of Rosemary Radford Ruether first crafted for a 2017 conference honoring Ruether. She reminds the reader of Ruether's own agenda to expose religion's role in the sustaining of and need to end oppressions based on race, class, gender, ecological abuse, and imperialism. In response, Douglass calls our attention to Ruether's active stance, always "questioning, analyzing, exploring, experiencing the world system of oppression—but also imagining how to create a liberated world beyond it. And doing both with passion" (6). This same approach and spirit are modeled in the articles that make up this issue, most especially those submitted by new scholars.

Each year, we honor submissions from scholars who are less than four years postgraduation. This year's first-place winner of the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award (NSA) is Jessica Coblentz. In "Hail, Mary! Mother and Ace: Envisioning an Asexual Mary of Nazareth for Today," she brings new understandings of asexuality to reinterpret the Catholic doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. Coblentz engages existing feminist Mariologies and seeks to combat both the sexually repressive church and the overdetermination of women's sexuality in Western society. The NSA articles show that the ability to interpret and reinterpret sacred text and doctrine is central to religious authority. In second place, Naheda Sharary reinforces this truism in her article, "Islamic Feminist Ijtihad among Palestinians in Israel," which details the leading approach of Palestinian Islamic feminist women in Israel. Through semistructured interviews with activists, she shows the importance of textual interpretation that improves women's status, while "furthering their struggle against the intersecting power structures of patriarchal Islam and Israeli policies" (33). The third-place winner offers another reinterpretation of long-held sexual and gender constructions. John Jerome Markowski invites the reader to explore blood rites for menstruating and the postpartum practices of women in Leviticus 12. Markowski, in "Finding Men in Menstruation," suggests that ancient Israelite men were allies, not enemies, of bleeding women, providing a synergy with cross-cultural practices and inspiration for modern models of menstrual rest and maternity leave.

The articles following the New Scholar Awardees trace power struggles for religious authority and self-definition including the ways in which religious ritual is used for and against the liberation of women-identified and queer people in patriarchal and heterosexist contexts across various religious, racial, and ethnic traditions. This section begins with Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz's un/queering of the Gai Jatra festival in Nepal. Drawing upon interviews and media accounts, Birkenholtz applies queer theory to describe how Gai Jatra serves to celebrate and make visible the local queer community in Nepal and raise the larger question of how Hinduism might "attract, facilitate, or deter an alignment" with queer communities (70). Continuing the examination of the role of ritual, Margaret Susan Thompson details the use of sacraments as a weapon of control against women religious in the nineteenth century. In "Sacraments as Weapons," she details the denial of Communion, restrictions on the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, and regimentation of confession as tools to punish so-called dangerous religious women's leadership by lifting up "archival sources from numerous congregations, as well as obscure published histories and memoirs" (89).

Each of the articles in this issue continues to make the case for historical retrieval and contemporary archiving. Such a record chronicles the nuances, strategery, losses, and gains for women-identified and gender-queer people on the margins of religious life. In "Southern Methodist Women and the Fight for Racial and Gender Justice, 1939–1990," Janet L. Allured recounts the history of women leaders who moved outside the predominantly white, male-led ecclesial structures to create parachurch structures like the United Methodist Women, who still have powerful influence. Through this history, she reveals the outsized role of southern US women in leadership who pushed for progressive racial and gender justice as well as their current impact on debates related to human sexuality.

While feminist scholars often focus their inquiry on the lives of women, feminist studies has been challenged by queer theory to reconsider its definitions of gender and by childist studies to look anew at how age impacts experiences of oppression. Sharon Betsworth and Julie Faith Parker offer a methodological argument for combining childist and feminist approaches to textual study. In "'Where Have All the Young Girls Gone?'" they reexamine texts in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament to uncover the powerful presence of girls, whose number and significance many commentators and readers have yet to appreciate.

As noted earlier, this issue ends with a special section on the influence and impact of Brooten's text Love Between Women. We are grateful to Joseph Marchal for their organizing of this section first at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and their efforts in bringing it to print in this issue. As Marchal notes, this section is "critical and celebratory, lively and substantial in ways that strongly correspond with JFSR's historical interest in honoring influential feminist scholars and desire to think reflexively and prospectively about our scholarly pasts in relation to our presents and anticipated futures" (143). The section speaks not only to the impact of a single text twenty-five years later, but also to the way a scholar's work can move a field to adopt feminist studies, queer, and intersectional approaches—in Brooten's case, to biblical, ancient Jewish, and emerging Christian materials.

Jennifer A. Glancy lifts up resonances of Brooten's early Christian archival work with her own work on Atlantic slavery and freedom, noting the difficulty of tracing histories that purposely excluded the very historical subjects one seeks to study. Furthering the impact of Brooten's methodology, Mónica I. Rey attends to the ways one must rely on embodied knowledge when dealing not only with missing sources, but with sources that actively distort and promote "detestable views" (156). It is in fact the filling in of historical gaps and resistance to a persistent silence that draws readers to new discoveries through Brooten's text. Christy Cobb describes reading Love Between Women as "the first time an academic book spoke to me personally. It showed me the power of academia to impact people. . . . Brooten provided me with the language, the texts, the proof, that women had been loving women since antiquity" (161). Cobb argues that Brooten's work anticipated and set the foundation for scholarship on sexuality in the ancient world.

Sheila Briggs, Tyler Schwaller, and Angela Standhartinger round out the special section in ways that chronicle Brooten's professional contributions to colleagues, church, and justice movements for sexual and gender inclusion. Briggs notes how Brooten's scholarship and her own relationships model transdisciplinary work. Schwaller attends to the significance of Brooten's work for congregational education and as a resource for fighting against anti-queer church policies. Standhartinger traces Brooten's career as she moves across and between religious, methodological, and gendered divides including Jewish and Christian, feminist and womanist, and LGBTQ and straight, in addition to working in a variety of languages. 

Brooten offers a response to this special section by noting key motivations that should ground much of feminist studies in religion and a question with which we all continue to wrestle. She writes, "The complex intersections among gender, violence, extreme inequality, power, and oppression continue to drive me" in the ongoing work of "calling into question 'what is a woman?'" (198). Oftentimes, it is difficult to distinguish methodological approaches from justice-seeking commitments in feminist studies in religion scholarship; perhaps that is how decades of scholarly and professional contributions shape a field that continually questions its own foundations to propel new and necessary inquiries. 

Stable URL: muse.jhu.edu/article/867765

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