Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
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of belief and practice under study. Engaging gender and sex as interrelated categories of analysis (gender/sex) in the study of religion clarifies the object of one’s study.
In the past, under the influence of Enlightenment epistemology, wherein the category of the human was the origin and basis for much theorizing done in the study of religion, complexity and diversity within an analysis were erased in order to ensure the subject of European philosophy, man. This man haunted, and in some measure continues to haunt, theorizing in religious studies, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, and science. At the same time, those studies that have shifted from this perspective continue to remain marginal in the university. Focusing solely on this man not only misses the social complexity and the structures that hold the religious edifices in place, but also distorts the analysis. Paying attention to gender/sex, sexuality, race, and class allows us to theorize the structures and understand better the multifaceted complexity of human social bodies.
The gendering of religions
The intersection of gender/sex and religions has been of interest to a number of theorists who study religions. Over the last five decades excellent work that looks at the ideological implications of gender/sex in the study of religion, or how gender and sex effect and affect the practice of religion, has been produced. These studies share a common interest in examining how religion has been one method to ensure the subordination of women in a variety of social and cultural locations, and the absence of women as living persons within the development and dissemination of religions. Such studies have sought to reveal the power imperatives, to bring women as subjects back into the various religions under study, and to examine men as gendered subjects. From here those interested in the intertwining of gender/sex and religion have developed analyses that examine historical and social shifts in a variety of cultures as registered by gender/sex, the political efficaciousness of gender/sex, and linked to this, the intersection of gender/sex with colonization. The interrelated categories of gender and sex provide a means and a way to understand not only the how and why of religions, but equally the how and why of social organization and the manufacturing of culture in and of itself.
Gender/sex and religious ideologies
The work of gendering religions has been taken up by a variety of feminists studying religions and theology. In the late 1960s and into the 1970s the work of Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza presented some of the earlier gender interventions into the study of religion. Each of these feminists did triple duty in terms of their work in the study of religion. First, they brought tools of analysis to the study of religion in order to think about how these systems of belief and practice were used to legitimate and shape the social body. Second, each then focused on women in the religious system under analysis in order to make apparent women’s activities and contributions. Third, each then furthered their analyses by interrelating patriarchal imperatives with women’s contributions and activities in order to think about religion.
Daly’s approach, after her rejection of Christianity, was to propose a two-world system located in most if not all societies. One part of this two-world system she named the foreground, which was a patriarchal construction operating in terms of patriarchal relations. The foreground was the site of women’s exploitation and oppression, and detrimental to women’s well-being. The second aspect of this two-world system was the Background, which
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was the real world that was obscured by the patriarchal world of the foreground. It is, Daly argued, in the Background that women can find their true being. This dualist world system, in large measure, reflects aspects of what is called feminist standpoint epistemology.
Feminist standpoint epistemology developed by Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill-Collins (black feminist standpoint), and Mary Daly, among others, takes the position that women, as an oppressed group, are in a position to have a clearer and less distorted picture of reality as they are outside, or marginal to, the dominant system of power relations and therefore considerably less invested in maintaining it. According to standpoint theory, the picture of reality developed in patriarchy (and all oppressive systems) is an inversion of reality, and those who are marginal to the system are able to see this inversion. Further to this, as patriarchy is invested in maintaining its vision of the world, which empowers it, it is unable to see beneath the surface. Only the oppressed can clearly determine the operations of this inversion, based upon their experiences, and envision a means to move beyond it. Institutionalized religion, understood as patriarchal religion, Daly argues, is one of the pillars that supports the foreground. God the father is merely an inversion of the reality of the Goddess and a means and a way to ensure that the patriarchal reality of the foreground continues to endure.
Schüssler Fiorenza’s contribution to the gendering of religion came in the form of uncovering patriarchal imperatives found in the New Testament and other texts related to the study of early Christianities. This method she called a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion, which exposes the intention to locate in the heavens and in nature the gender ideologies produced by the group. So for example, Paul’s letter to the Corinthians (I Corinthians 11: 1–16), when discussing men’s and women’s hair related to normative male and female being, makes apparent Paul’s operative gender ideology, which is his own and is one that emerges from his social location and has little to do with either deity or nature. Certainly Paul supports his understanding of normative male and female being by making recourse to deity and nature. Much as in the Buddhist RisshōKōseikai example, Paul’s understanding of normative male and female appearance and behavior calls on nature to legitimate his view. In this passage Paul understands that it is a disgrace for women to have short hair and dishonorable for men to have long hair. Working within the honor–shame oriented culture of ancient Rome, the maintenance of social standing is intimately linked to honor, and for women to attempt to appear masculine (short hair) and therefore elevate their status is a disgrace, while for men to appear feminine (long hair) means a loss of social status and therefore dishonor. Male and female hairstyles, then, are culturally coded and reflect a gender ideology.
Second, she sought to make apparent women’s activities in the early Christian communities through a feminist hermeneutics of remembrance. In this gender-sensitive methodology she examined not only the actions and contributions of men, but also those of women in these communities. Finally, by combining the hermeneutics of suspicion and remembrance, she developed what she termed a feminist critical hermeneutics of liberation. Through this model she hoped to be able to reclaim Christian history for concerned women and men of all nations, colors, and sexual orientation without engaging in Christian apologetics.
Rosemary Radford Ruether’s gendering of religion also challenged patriarchal imperative of religions, particularly Judaism and Christianity. She too noted the absence of women and set upon a project of reclaiming and reconstructing women’s Christian histories. She too developed a project of rereading and rewriting in order to reconceptualize a new Catholic Christianity as a system of belief and practice that creates a positive space for concerned women and men of all nations, colors, and sexual orientation. By gendering religion she,
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like Daly and Schüssler-Fiorenza, sought not only to understand the ideological impact of religion on women, and construct histories of women and religion, but also to move the study of religion toward developing analyses that reflected more honestly the social and historical realities of human systems of meaning.
Gender/sex and religious practices
The kinds of analyses indicated above represent some of the work of feminists in the study of religion through the 1970s and 1980s. Feminists, having learned the need to reread and rethink religious and historical texts, went on to think about how the interrelated categories of gender/sex shaped the knowledge and the systems of belief and practice that women produced. A particularly influential thinker working in this frame is Susan Starr Sered and her comparative text Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women published in 1994. There were of course other texts published in a similar vein, for example, Diane Bell’s text Daughters of the Dreaming published in 1983. In such texts, theorists took gender/ sex as their cue and began to examine the religious orientations, creations, and inclinations of women. At the center of their studies was an interest in women’s symbolic discourses and how women’s symbolic discourses might differ from men’s.
Sered’s introductory chapter in Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister briefly relates how the author engages specifically the category of gender in order to think about what might be central to women’s religiosity and how it might be different from men’s religiosity. This question, circling around the category of gender/sex, assumes from the outset that if indeed there is a difference between men’s and women’s religious beliefs and actions, that this difference could be related to their differing social lives. She notes that cross-culturally women of differing social groups share concerns such as childbearing and motherhood, which of course intersect with economic, social, physiological, and psychological concerns. Connected to this explicitly is child rearing and related to child rearing is healing. These appear to be issues that are often at the center of women’s religiosity and as such suggest a gender/sex difference.
However, as Sered notes, men and women’s religiosity are more alike than they are unalike. Although concerns may demonstrate gender/sex differences, both women and men make recourse to superordinate beings (singular or plural), both use ritual to imaginatively interact with these beings, and both have central myths that organize the system of belief and practice. As female and male are not opposite in sex, so women’s and men’s religions are not opposite in religion. Sered (1994: 8–9) suggests that when women and men’s religiosity do differ, it is related to how superordinate beings are imagined, e.g. Jesus as feminine as among the Shakers of the American Colonies; the how and why of engagement with superordinate beings, e.g. through possession to heal the afflicted as with the Zar cult in the northern Sudan; the shaping and understanding of ritual actions, e.g. women as ritual leaders; and the way that they engage such issues as existence, e.g. women’s ritual power as social power as with the Sande secret society in Sierra Leone and Liberia. But equally important to women and men’s religiosity is the issue of power. Religiosity can and does confer power, whether on the basis of gender/sex, status, race, prestige, or age and is a means by which power is circulated or contested. Because of the propensity of gender/sex to be related to power, it is necessary to analytically engage gender/sex head-on when studying religion.
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Gender/sex and performance
Judith Butler in her formative text Gender Trouble, first published in 1990 (10th anniversary edition 1999), equally suggests that it is gender that supports the category of sex and not the reverse. Following up on this, she makes an extended and complex argument demonstrating what is at stake politically when the category of sex is left as fixed and immutable beneath the category of gender, heterosexism. Linked to heterosexism, she argues, is the idea that individuals are trapped, not by biological imperatives as feminism had challenged this by socializing the category of gender, but now by cultural imperatives, since feminists had left the category of sex untheorized. She states that ‘[t]he institution of a compulsory and naturalized heterosexuality requires and regulates gender as a binary relation in which the masculine term is differentiated from a feminine term, and this differentiation is accomplished through the practices of heterosexual desire’ (30). Butler clearly and succinctly demonstrated how gender in feminist theorizing continued to uphold ‘normative’ ideas concerning sex and gender to the peril of a feminist analysis and its claims to be liberating.
Added to this keen observation, Butler made another equally important observation; that gender/sex is performed. Butler, a feminist poststructuralist, underscored in her text the political imperative affiliated with the categories of gender/sex, and asked what might be the effects of such an imperative. This question allowed her to conjecture how identity itself was a political category with gender/sex central to this identity. Linked to this, then, was the necessity to perform gender/sex, so that those who ascribe to (are ascribed to) the category of female must perform as feminine or those who ascribe to (are ascribed to) the category male must perform as masculine. Furthermore, those ascribed as male, but desiring to the female, could perform as feminine and those ascribed as female, but desiring to the male, could perform as masculine; although this was done at their peril since they would be disciplined for transgressing gender boundaries. Butler argued ‘[t]here is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results’ (33).
In the field of religious studies, particularly ritual, the instability and performativity of gender/sex are eminently apparent. Most visible in rites such as female and male circumcision, one sees the instability of sex as a natural category since the cutting of the body’s genitals, the primary site of gender/sex, is used to properly fix the sex of the initiate. Furthermore, one notes the necessity to perform as woman or man in the acceptance of the cut that moves the child who would shriek to the adult who would capture said shriek between clenched teeth.
Gender/sex and historicity
In the text Spirited Women: Gender, Religion and Cultural Identity in the Nepal Himalaya (1996) Joanne C. Watkins, an anthropologist, is concerned with the ‘interplay between changing trade patterns, gender meanings, and cultural identity in Nyeshang society’ (4). Her concern, among other things, is to chart the changing gender ideology under the pressure of trade with the larger world. The interrelated categories of gender and sex, formulated in relation to religious beliefs, cultural systems and imperatives of kinship relations, are shifting and these shifts, then, register change in the social body and in the social identity of the group (Buddhist). In this kind of formulation, gender/sex, then, provides a window not only into understanding a cultural system, but provides a way to chart changes within a cultural system. It is this latter function, a window for understanding social and cultural change, for example, that has led some to assume that gender/sex was a means by which
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to determine religious fundamentalism, rather than a means by which to chart change. In other words, rather than assume a change toward more austere gender relations marks a shift toward fundamentalism, one should recognize that gender/sex actually becomes a means and a way to mark change in itself. Gender and sex, then, as they are both social categories are historical categories that reflect changes in the belief system over time (see also Laura L. Vance, Seventh-day Adventism in Crisis: Gender and Sectarian Change in an Emerging Religion (1999) who also registers changes in the social body by using the category of gender/sex).
Gender/sex and politics
The categories of gender/sex are a central concern in Patricia Jeffery and Amrita Basu’s edited text Appropriating Gender: Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia (1998). In this text, as the title suggests, gender ideology acts as a category to register political activism. Basu states that ‘in the past decade or so, religion and gender have become increasingly intertwined in the political turmoil that envelops South Asia’ (3). Women, the gendered category, have, in some locations, become the repository of ‘religious beliefs, and the keepers of the purity and integrity of the community’ (3) felt to be under attack by the increasing globalization generated by such institutions as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. As noted above, gender and sex are not static categories and indeed register shifts and change in social bodies and, as the authors note, can become the means by which to initiate or resist social change. For example, the state, which can take on the masculine in relation to the feminized social body, can act as a paternalistic force that oversees the social body ensuring its proper functioning. It can be the state, as evinced in the United States in the early twenty-first century, that calls upon a particular gender ideology, heterosexual and masculine in this instance, to shore up and protect a social body it perceives to be under attack. The twin towers, symbols of American masculinity, attacked and felled in September of 2001, initiated a hypermasculine response of excessive militarism that was launched against the feminized Middle Eastern ‘other.’ ‘Gender provides,’ as Basu rightly comments, ‘an extremely fruitful lens through which to interpret the actions of the state and of ethnic and religious communities’ (5–6).
Gender/sex: where to from here?
As I hope I have made clear in the above, the interrelated categories of gender and sex are infinitely useful toward interrogating and understanding religions. In many ways gender/sex is a signing system that acts as a window that allows the viewer to see the complexities of human existence. Gender/sex, although still not a central category of analysis in the study of religions for many theorists, must be further sounded to push further our understanding of human social and cultural systems.
For example, in my own work I have sought to make apparent the mythological ground of gender ideology. This has been a process of revealing or bringing to consciousness the binarism that continues to fuel the ways in which we understand gender/sex. To first uncover the logic of binarism, noting that a significant root binary in most cultural systems is the male/female binary, and then to underscore the linguisticality of binarism allow for the socialization and historicization of binaries and subsequently, gender/sex. Yet this does not fully reveal just what is at stake in gender ideology.