Editors’ Introduction

To see them,
you must hold that text to the fire.

The closing lines of Jessica Jacobs's featured poem "No One's Loves, No One's Wives" capture the spirit of this issue (63). The authors are indeed holding texts in all their diversity, including cookbooks, the Bible, the Qur'an, mythical tales, and even the bodies of the authors' subjects, to a metaphorical fire of feminist inquiry. Feminist work requires reading anew to uncover the role of female agency and coconspirators working for liberation in various tenuous patriarchal religious circumstances. At the same time, authors illuminate the falsehood that shared gender oppression leads to solidarity, as well as the ways gender and religion share norming processes.

The issue begins with three articles that press the narratives and texts they approach toward more complex and nuanced reading. The section begins with Gillian Alban's exploration of literature on Melusine, the maternal snake-tailed foundress. Comparing this literature with various female goddess and biblical figure narratives, Alban recounts how Melusine's monstrous hybridity entwines with her gendered status, ultimately creating her "tantalizing force and her supernatural prowess" (7). Moving from a text of monstrosity to the mundane, Shenila Khoja-Moolji considers the text of two cookbooks. The article follows two Shia Ismaili Muslim cookbook authors, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Noorbanu Nimji, who transform the act of refugee placemaking from a task oriented to built environments to one using the privatized, gendered, and sensory nature of cooking. The articles section concludes with Christy Cobb's "Enslaved Women, Women Enslavers: Kyriarchy and Intersectionality in the New Testament." She holds three stories of women from Galatians, Acts 12, and Acts 16 up to the fires of ancient and contemporary analysis. She shows how women who were enslavers of other women disrupt and reify gender oppression in antiquity while also [End Page 1] considering the ways these biblical texts have been deployed to support white supremacy.

Following the articles, Jessica Jacobs's poems imagine their way into Talmudic narratives, letting marginal (and marginalized) figures claim space and speak with wisdom. Even when contemplating violence, Jacobs's vivid images bring us back to the world and to wonder: "Each living thing / its own call to attention" (62).

The next section indeed seeks "to see them," as noted in Jacobs's second poem. Three authors brought together with the assistance of Celene Ibrahim reconsider the female figures in the Moses narrative in the Bible and the Qur'an. Rachel Adelman, Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar, and Maria Massi Dakake extended their pieces from a presentation at the International Conference of the Society of Biblical Literature in Salzburg, Austria, in 2022. Each author attends to ways of reading that highlight the significant role of women, including the feminine-gendered earth. It reminds us how the agency of women in this text "leads to action that can overcome genocidal decrees and transcend ethnoreligious lines" (65), as exemplified in Adelman's piece. Dunbar depicts the female figures as freedom fighters who collude with the earth to bring about justice and end oppression. In "Shelter from the Tyrant," Dakake focuses on Nuṣrat Amīn's translation and commentary of the qur'anic passages and how she "considers the way in which certain narrative details found in the qur'anic account, as well as the Qur'an's unique narrative style, serve to highlight the perspicacity, courage, and independent agency of these women" (95).

Elaine Wainwright, an Australian biblical scholar, is familiar with holding texts to the fire. In this Across Generations interview conducted by long-time Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion board member Kathleen McPhillips, the reader learns about the impact of Wainwright's scholarship and organizing for the development of feminist biblical studies in the Pacific region.

The final section of this issue holds up economies of gender for scrutiny, how they are produced and consumed, and importantly, transitioned in similar ways to religion. This is done in comparative fashion, yielding what the contributors name comparative ex-religious studies, or Comparative X. This section "offers a way of looking at the norming systems of religion and gender together through the movements of those who cross them," writes Shira Schwartz (117). After Schwartz's essay, which frames and deepens this new approach, four additional authors provide examples that are specific yet rich in religious, geographic, historical, and gender diversity. The section concludes with commentary by Kathryn Lofton. Highlighting the authors' insights on the role of exiting, she writes, "In addition to capturing the power of ex life as a porthole to gender perception, the work gathered here encourages the study of religion to see how much its exes can teach" (173). This section demonstrates that exes are not texts that have discarded religion but texts that hold a fire to religion.

Jessica Jacobs's poems remind us of the values embedded within this issue. Jacobs writes of holding on to texts, even those that are problematic. And she writes of listening to the sounds of people, animals, and things that have been overlooked. We hope this issue provides an opportunity for the reader to join our authors in this collective feminist endeavor.

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