Editors’ Introduction

With a new year come new changes at JFSR. In this issue, we are announcing a new annual award named in honor of Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, experimenting with a new section called Living It Out articles, and celebrating coeditor Zayn Kassam’s new appointment and subsequent stepping down from the journal’s editorial team. Significant changes often highlight what stays constant. The content of this issue crosses religious traditions and historic time periods to remind us that even when religious texts, images, and practices produce gender oppression, female-identified practitioners, goddesses, and believers confound and disrupt patriarchy.

The articles section of this issue follows a historical trajectory while taking the reader on a global journey using examples of material culture to show the nuanced agency and presence of the feminine, even in the absence of female-identified religious actors. In the first article, Juyan Zhang details the origins and identities of two Buddhist goddesses, Tārā and Cundā, through an analysis of stone and metal images to trace the prototypes for these goddesses in Indic and Tibetan traditions. Gillian Alban then takes the reader to the Mediterranean to witness the ways in which statues of and literature about Medusa evidence the power of female figures’ “hold on the male unconscious in rising above castigation, asserting their amazing procreative force over life and death, enabled through Medusa’s stunning tale and transfixing gaze” (49). The nuanced navigation of patriarchal religious culture is further examined by Rosemary Admiral, moving us farther west and south to the premodern Islamic areas of North Africa and al-Andalus. Admiral investigates women’s sexual agency through fatwas documenting marital disputes. Examples of women refusing sex from this time period can, Admiral argues, show women as sexual agents negotiating consent in marriage, akin to modern circumstances.

The final two essays in this section cover more modern periods while presenting no less complicated negotiations of gender and feminism across religious and domestic spaces. In “Intertwined Histories: Muslim Domesticity and the Harem in the Eyes of a Swedish Nineteenth-Century Protestant Feminist,” Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati interrogates the complicated feminist claims of Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer through an analysis of her encounter with Muslim women in Jerusalem in the spring of 1859. Zorgati argues that counter to other white European feminists of the time, Bremer critiqued white patriarchy and supported a program for female liberation. The final essay in the section provides a theoretical frame by which to read the women’s place/space and presence/absence in all the previously mentioned examples. Wai Ching Angela Wong draws upon Jacques Derrida’s presence/absence dialectic and Victor Turner’s liminality of religion to trace women subjects “Beyond the Boundary of Home” in the context of Hong Kong, as her title suggests. She provides cases from four different religious traditions, reinforcing that religiously gendered subjects are never static or singular.

With poetry, Julie R. Enszer embodies the experience of female present absence in comparison to male religious and political leaders. Juxtaposing the mundane and the spiritual, political and local, patriarchy and liberation, she vividly depicts the truth of her response: “but none of us know / what counts— /who counts— / in the eyes of G!d” (130). Even though the particularity of experience cannot be fully known by the reader, the affirmation of worth and dignity in the face of religious dismissal, racial politics, and gender oppression resonates.

For this issue, we have inaugurated a “mash-up” of the feature Living It Out and traditional articles. This hybrid category combines an anonymously peer-reviewed constructive essay with a critical reflection on the development of feminist (religious) movements seeking to transform systems of injustice in the academy, religious institutions and communities, and the broader society. Carine Plancke focuses on a UK yoga practice called womb yoga in “Reclaiming Yoga as a Practice of Female Empowerment.” Through ethnographic research, including participant observation and interviews, she explores the feminist potential of womb yoga. In the final article of this section and the issue, Darryl Stephens outlines the Christian ethical act of bearing witness as a way of leveraging privilege in solidary with trauma survivors as a feminist, antiracist liberative practice. He builds on the relational theology of Marjorie Suchocki and the resistance ethics of Traci West to describe bearing witness in parallel stages to trauma recovery, developing a trauma-informed Christian ethical response to sexual violence for allies.

One of the preeminent examples of “Living It Out”—developing womanist and feminist religious movements seeking to transform systems of injustice—is the Rev. Dr. Cannon. The Katie G. Cannon award honors her legacy as a pathbreaking womanist scholar in religion and as a founding member of the journal’s editorial board. As part of the journal’s continuing efforts to combat anti-Black racism, this award encourages and gives recognition to womanist scholarship and activism and seeks to facilitate conversation on anti-Black racism and white supremacy related to feminist studies in religion. Submissions for the award can reflect the full range of Dr. Cannon’s interests including any of the featured areas of the journal; for more on each feature see https://www.fsrinc.org/features/. See page 5 for further information.

With a mix of sadness and joy, we acknowledge yet another amazing feminist religious scholar’s contribution to JFSR. Dr. Zayn Kassam has been appointed director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, UK; she is the first woman to hold this post. In her role as coeditor, she expanded the religious, historical, and geographic diversity of published materials. She brought her consummate professionalism, caring spirit, and decolonial acumen to the (sometimes fraught) processes of review and editing. She will be greatly missed in her role as coeditor, and we wish her all the best as she navigates numerous changes in this new year.

Stable URL: muse.jhu.edu/article/893189

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