Introduction

For a few years in the 2010s, it seemed that the notion of “cancel culture” had taken over public media discourse. When so-called social-justice warriors publicly challenged the misogynist and racist behavior of others, the subsequent cycle of social-media excoriation, apology, and defiance occasionally resulted in people being fired or losing opportunities. But ironically, sometimes “cancellation” led to more notoriety, more followers, and more platforms than before.

The “canceled”—invariably people with more privilege and power than their critics—were able to recast any criticism as the cultural overreaction of “snowflakes” determined to silence them. But this all seemed a bit silly, because nobody—try as we might—is really canceled or silenced in the age of the internet. Someone fired from their position on a TV news show can start their own YouTube channel. Kicked off one social media platform? Just join another. Despite their lamentations, the “canceled” generally got to continue speaking. Loudly.

The project of silencing those who call out injustice is well known to feminists, who have been silenced and who have been attentive to the silencing of others for generations. Throughout history, when campaigns have been waged to limit whose voices get heard, whose histories are told, and by whom, it has been women, queer people, and those on the margins who are “canceled.” For decades, feminist scholarship in religion was occupied primarily with uncovering women’s hidden voices. Scholars offered new readings of biblical stories from the perspective of women who do not speak in the text. Or they described women’s religious lives that had been overlooked in patriarchal religious traditions. This work is still vital, and reminds us of Anne Braude’s assertion that women’s religious history is religious history.

Yet feminist scholarship in our field has also expanded beyond simply accounting for women to offer critical, intersectional analyses of sacred texts, archival documents, contemporary rituals, and theological writings. This feminist approach to the study of religion asserts that the silencing of women and those on the margins [End Page 1] has not just erased their stories from the historical record, but in fact has prevented a comprehensive understanding of power, identity, gender, class, race, and sexuality in religion. The articles in this issue of the journal contribute both to the reclaiming of women’s voices and histories and to an understanding of religion from a feminist perspective.

In their articles, Shula Mola and Emmanuel O. Ojeifo bring women’s religious rituals to light in order to show their centrality in theological and cultural identity. In “Hearing Their Hidden Voices,” Mola uncovers two modes of silencing. First, by conducting qualitative research with Ethiopian Jewish women in Israel, she demonstrates that Zar spirit possession is not, in fact, a forgotten religious practice. Furthermore, Mola shows how women in Beta Israel communities use Zar to “make their experiences audible” (66). In “Of Umbilical Cord and Placenta,” Ojeifo draws on the work of the African ecofeminist scholar and gender-justice activist Fulata Lusungu Moyo. In her writings about the significance of burying the umbilical cord in African cosmology, Moyo appropriates the umbilical cord ritual as a way of doing theology. Ojeifo argues that this move “connects the raw materiality of faith to the feminine biological reality of birth” (91). This formulation of African feminist theology highlights issues that have not received sufficient attention in African theology, namely androcentrism in clergy formation, phallocracy in Christian preaching, cultural preference for male children, denial of women’s agency and authority, and negative stereotyping of women’s biology.

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, we have a first-place winner and two articles tied for second place. Our first-place winner is Kelsi Morrison-Atkins, whose article, “Dressed to Profess: Clothing, Speech, and Silence in 1 Timothy 2:9–11,” offers a feminist analysis of a biblical text that focuses on women to show that the text is not just talking about women but also about class, authority, and prayer. While many scholars have assumed that regulations about women’s clothing in 1 Timothy contribute to the sexualization of women, Morrison-Atkins rejects this notion, referring to it as the “distraction hypothesis” (6). Instead, she shifts attention to the ritual and embodied dynamics of this text and incorporates an intersectional and kyriarchal analysis that highlights the classed dimensions of these dress codes. The NSA selection committee praised Morrison-Atkins’s writing for its clarity, focus, and originality in New Testament studies.

The two articles tied for second place draw on archival sources to construct a new religious history. Despite growing awareness of the sexual abuse of Catholic women religious, accounts of their abuse often highlight women’s resilience while marginalizing the abuse itself. Magdalena Hürten and Tracy McEwan apply the hermeneutics of epistemic awareness in their article, “Narratives of Resilience and the Silencing of Abuse Among Catholic Women Religious,” to archives of [End Page 2] two congregations of women religious as well as archival letters and documents to glean “what is spoken and what remains unsaid, whose voices are amplified, and whose are silenced” (48). The NSA selection committee noted that Hürten and McEwan’s methodology allowed for attentiveness to the silencing of both the abused and the administrators.

Emily Nelms Chastain similarly uses archival sources to uncover women’s voices, but she goes further. In fact, Chastain’s article, “Reclaiming Silenced Voices,” outlines a feminist archival methodology that can “reconstruct . . . curated absences” (26). Focusing on the history of the Association of Women Preachers, an organization advocating for women’s ordination in American Methodism in the early twentieth century, Chastain finds that Methodist journals of the time did not document the decision-making process around women’s ordination, making it appear as if the decision came out of nowhere. The selection committee described this article as “a model for feminist archival work and discursive analysis. It reframes women’s ordination as cumulative, collective labor rather than singular acts of heroism.” Through this feminist archival methodology, Chastain is able to tell a story of lived theology and institutional change.

Finally, the poems featured in this issue raise similar issues about silencing and being attentive to those silences. Alex K.O.’s poems depict a mother who has been silenced but who responds to that silence in different ways, encouraging us to listen in different ways. In “Pieta,” the poem’s speaker sees their mother “holding grief” and “holding all her sorrows like an arch dam” (63). This mother is deeply feeling emotions, yet remains silent about those feelings. She makes adjustments and accommodations for others but ultimately remains committed to her marriage because those vows were taken “in front of Christ.” Likely referencing Michaelangelo’s marble sculpture of Mary holding Jesus after he was removed from the cross, the poem’s title, meaning “pity” or “compassion,” suggests how onlookers are supposed to feel toward Mary. Mary, though, appears to be hiding her grief, depicted with a young face and a strong, cradling body that holds her son. In the second poem, however, K.O. writes of a mother who is trapped in a “loop of chaos,” performing various actions to “awaken her mind” (64). This mother is not silent. She shouts at smoke, beats a ladle against a pot, and drops glass tumblers. Though we do not hear her speak, we know she is there, making sense out of the chaos, because we can hear these noises. Like the articles in this issue, Alex K.O.’s poems train our ears to listen differently to the silences.

Emily Chastain writes, “archives do not simply preserve the past; they produce it” (26). Though Chastain is speaking about denominational archives, we think this quote is relevant for scholarship more broadly. The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion is not simply an archive of scholarship about women’s religious lives past and present. Together, we produce new knowledge about religion and groundbreaking modes of feminist analysis.

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https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.00079

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