This essay was part of a final assessment that was submitted on April 28, 2022 for my Theories of Religion course.
Katherine Young’s concern for feminist advocacy in academia seems to hinge on an extreme caricature of feminists who are driven by pure emotion without much concern for rationality. Young points out that some feminists notoriously ignore constructive criticism, making effort to deconstruct opposing discourses instead of their own and insulating themselves on the basis of redemption for a long history of women subordination. Some feminists insist on undermining men as a class because of the fact that the asymmetrical treatment towards women as a class is not completely resolved in the contemporary world, going as far as to assert that men are inherently evil because of culture or innately evil due to nature. Ideologies like this reinforce the polarization between men and women, further cultivating problems of resentment and hostility towards the opposite gender instead of bridging the gap through inclusivity and mutual respect (Young 300). While contemporary Western scholarship recognizes the value of the subjective experience, Young observes that the emphasis on the subjective experience becomes a slippery slope when it is used as a scapegoat for feminists to dismiss criticism and accountability. Namely, Young is wary of the feminist assertion that male scholars are illegible to contribute to or critique women’s studies because they will never know what it feels like to be a woman (282), despite the fact that outsider knowledge can also provide unique information and insights that may be unknown or unacknowledged by insiders (285). Despite good intentions to speak up as an insider of a minority group, insider perspectives run the risk of biases that can taint the accuracy of claims and facts (284). In this sense women’s studies retain academic integrity by continuing to value objective analyses conventional to scholarship, however feminist advocacy charged with the subjective experience is inappropriate in the classroom.
The perspectives of Rebecca Chopp, Rosalind Shaw, Ursula King, and Darlene Juschka push forward the necessity of feminism in theology and religious studies, advocating for a feminist transformation in academia that disproves Young’s concerns. As Young defines it in her introduction, the fundamental aim of feminism is to identify the problems of women as a class and to promote their interests as a class (2). While this can be done in non-academic settings, such as in politics, it is equally necessary to bring the feminist agenda in scholarship in order to tackle the androcentrism that is deeply-rooted in the foundation of Western knowledge.
Both King and Juschka shed light on feminist theory that works to transform the production of knowledge, understanding that there is a need to emphasize women in scholarship because they had been voiceless for most of human history. King points out that most religious phenomena, even when studied by women, still conform to the androcentric framework which defines the intellectual task in the very effort of deconstruction and reconstruction (King 417). While constructs of the ultimate reality and transcendence can be male, female, androgynous, genderless, or beyond gender altogether, religion at the empirical level still maintains a level of male-dominance in the prevailing social structure (414-415). The androcentric presuppositions underpinning scholarship often goes unnoticed, leading to deficiencies in data gathering, model building and theorizing in religious studies. It is all the more crucial then for women scholars to challenge these existing paradigms in religious studies and utilize current feminist theology to question basic assumptions in prevailing organizations of knowledge in order to unveil the androcentric tendencies that need to change (King 412; 417). Juschka emphasizes the fact that institutionalized religion, which is patriarchal in nature, contributes to the formation of an oppressive reality because it often legitimizes male domination. To recognize social categories that pertain to power, such as gender, race, and class in the study of belief systems brings clarity and depth to the object of study and helps us to better understand the complexity of the social body (Juschka 235). The ideas surrounding gender that are created by social or cultural factors, such as religion, in turn influence and inform other social factors. In this sense, Juschka believes that gender ideology can be used to examine various social discourses and their contribution to the production of knowledge (240).
Shaw similarly sheds light on the inherent interdisciplinary nature of religion, arguing that sociopolitical relations and power imbalances should be understood as inherent to the religious experience. The conception of religion as sui generis became prevalent in religious scholarship to combat reductionist theories that explained religion as a function of other social phenomena. However, Shaw expresses that experiences of colonial power, gender asymmetry, and male dominance makes up much of the lived religious experience (428-429). Detaching power and social organization from the analysis of gender and religion causes issues in properly understanding the religious phenomena because it leaves behind meaningless accounts of gender roles and female deities found in religious traditions (Shaw 429). To bracket off feminist sentiments of male dominance and gender asymmetry as something irrelevant to the religious experience is reductionist and does not fully encompass the religious phenomena being analyzed in scholarship.
Chopp likewise highlights that feminist theory brings in a fresh perspective to feminist theology by evoking new methods of analysis that may have not existed under an androcentric scholarship. In her analysis of the ways feminist theory has been implicated in feminist theology, Chopp aims to understand the scope of feminist theory in theology. She acknowledges Young’s concerns for disillusioned feminism in scholarship in her emphasis on pragmatism, combining theories instead of tunnel-visioning on a single theory in order to achieve an ultimate aim (Chopp 224). Chopp contends that feminist theology should not feel confined to the limits feminist theory to define sites of contention and substance of its reflection because it causes a certain fixation that risks becoming too far-off from both the realities of the real world and the overarching feminist vision of what the world should be (229; 231). Alternatively, Chopp believes that feminist theory is a lens that can be used for more than just to tackle explicitly “feminist” issues, but to provoke important and enriching new questions for feminist theology (231).
Work Cited
Chopp, Rebecca S. "Theorizing Feminist Theology." In Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition, and Norms. Ed. Rebecca S. Chopp. and Shiela Greeve Davaney. Minneapolis MN: Fortress Press, 1997, 215–231, 258–259.
Juschka, Darlene M. "Gender." In The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, Second Edition. Ed. John R. Hinnells. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, 245–258.
King, Ursula. "Gender and the Study of Religion." In Theories of Religion: A Reader. Ed. Seth D. Kinin with Johnathan Miles-Watson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006, 411–424.
Shaw, Rosalind. "Feminist Anthropology and the Gendering of Religious Studies." In Theories of Religion: A Reader. Ed. Seth D. Kinin with Johnathan Miles-Watson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006, 425–433.
Young, Katherine K. "Introduction"; "Postscript." In Feminism and World Religions. Ed. Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 1–24, 279–312.
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