An Epistemology of Religion and Gender

Biopolitics, Performativity and Agency

Ulrike E. Auga

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032237008
• eBook ISBN: 9781000064698
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book puts forward a new epistemological framework for a theory of religion and gender's role in the public sphere. It provides a sophisticated understanding of gender and its relation to religion as a primarily performative category of knowledge production, rooting that understanding in case studies from around the world.

Gender and religion are examined alongside biopolitics and the influence of capitalism, neoliberalism and empire. The book analyses the interdependence of religion, gender and new nationalisms in the Palestinian territories, South Africa and the USA, scrutinising the biopolitical interferences of nation states and dominant political and religious institutions. It then moves on to uncover counter-discourses and spaces of activism and agency in contexts such as East Germany and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Using gender, queer and trans theory in tandem with postcolonial and post-secular perspectives, readers are shown a more nuanced understanding of critical contemporary questions related to religion, gender and sexuality.

This is a bold new take on religion, gender and public life. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies and Gender Studies, as well as those working on religion's interaction with Politics, Sociology and Social Activism.

1
Introduction

1 Challenging observations

Is critique secular? Is feminist critique secular? “Western” science was, until the present day, dominated by a controversial secularity of critique. It is amongst others an inheritance of a too simple narrative of progress as a development from the religious to the secular. However, Tomoku Masuzawa shows how the invention of an essentialised category “religion” in the 19th century is a product of secularisation in order to establish a hierarchy between modern and non-modern.¹ Talal Asad elaborates the binary where “the West” constructs: Christianity, secularism, reason, tolerance and free thought on the one hand and locates Islam, fundamentalism, subjugation, intolerance and limited thinking on the other. As a result, either “religion” was labeled as unreasonable or Christianity as the more rational “religion”.² “Religion” was denied the opportunity to be a place for the gaining of agency both for the individual and collective subject and as a place of designing new knowledge for a society of solidarity.

“What is critique?” is the name of a famous essay by Michel Foucault. Through history, a reflection on this concept is taking place.³ Reinhart Koselleck shows how critique emerges as the legal term “krisis” in ancient Athens. “Krisis” integrates polis break, tribunal, listening, knowledge, judgment and repair simultaneously and connects subject and object in practice.⁴ Krisis refers to a specific work of the city on itself – a practice of seeing, judging and repairing. The term often loses today this multifaceted holism.

Jürgen Habermas, “creator” of the concept of the public sphere, recently underlined the importance of “religion” for this, thereby correcting himself.⁵ Charles Taylor argues for a radical re-definition of the concept of secularity.⁶ Cornel West, icon of African-American resistance, emphasises the importance of emancipatory and visionary theological approaches.⁷ Judith Butler underlines that cohabitation with less violence is only possible with deessentialised notions of religion.⁸

Saba Mahmood shows how in a grassroots Muslim movement in the context of religious and bodily practices, agency and human flowering are gained and that religion is not only a violent and patriarchal sphere for female subjects.⁹

Rosi Braidotti summarises that the post-secular turning point challenges European (secularist) feminism as it implies that agency or political subjectivity can also be conveyed through religious piety, including spirituality.¹⁰

Joan Wallach Scott develops a critique of the recent discourse on secularism, which pretends that secularity stands for freedom and gender equality, unlike Islam which is depicted as a synonym for oppression. The idea that gender equality lives in the logic of secularity is inaccurate. In addition, this historical misstatement was used to justify the notions of racial and religious superiority of the “white”, “Western” and “Christian”. Gender inequality is cemented in the emergence of “Western” nations characterised by a separation of the public and the private, the political and the religious.¹¹

In queer-feminist-materialistic theorising, experience, rationality, science and religion are also further negotiated. Donna Haraway created the figure of cyborg as early as 1985 in her manifesto to question established concepts. The border between humans and machines as well as humans and animals becomes blurred. “Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene” proclaims this age, which does respect the life of other beings and relationships beyond biological kinship.¹²

Inopportunely, in the current Anthropocene humans destroy the earth, an account which informs not only Haraway but also Braidotti. In her critical “post-humanism”, Braidotti creates a unity of all matter and unfolds a nomadic, multidimensional subjectivity to overcome violent naturalising concepts. Such ontologies characterise queer space-time notions that do not “other” religion and understand it as “situated knowledge”. Scientific results are to be presented as perspectives, not as universal truths.

Religious studies and theological research and their epistemological positioning play a central role in the generation of symbolic, religious, legal and, ultimately, material orders. For example, Robert Yelle examines the relationship between the British colonial regime in India and theology and ethics. He can show how colonial thinking was influenced centrally by Protestant and especially Puritan theology.¹³

I would like to join in and underline that at the heart of the invention and regulation of religion and theological norms is the symbolic gender order that is central to the construction of exclusions and hierarchies. It therefore seems to me fundamental to extend the epistemological approach of research in the field of religion and to emphasise religion and gender as formed and forming categories of knowledge in interaction.

On the one hand, therefore, I use the terms “religion” and “gender” as categories of knowledge and, on the other hand, I start from the genealogical connection between power and knowledge. However, according to Michel Foucault, the formation of knowledge about gender in discourses not only refers to the social or symbolic level but is fundamentally about the knowledge of life and survival in contexts of violence in the generation of collectives. In the context of biopolitical interventions, I would like to criticise regulatory and disciplinary mechanisms and, moreover, address their connection to the production of theological knowledge and the category religion.

On the other hand, in the intersectional consideration of gender, race, class, nation, and so on, there is a neglect of the actual deconstruction of the category religion. According to my observation, the cultural-scientific research of Gender and Postcolonial Theory only gradually takes on the importance of theological categories. While deconstructivist gender research itself claims a deessentialised concept of gender, some assume an essentialised concept of religion for all theology and do not associate religion with “agency”. However, gender deconstruction is coupled with the deconstruction of religion, not negation of religion. This applies to both religious and a-religious approaches.

This publication gives an overview of the central debates at the interface of gender and religion research. From a postcolonial, post-secular and gender/queer perspective, a separate epistemology has been developed for the study of religion and gender.

The method of intersectionality is revised for the analysis of religion. The category religion, which is often neglected or essentialised in feminist theory and gender research, is further discussed in terms of gender, sexuality, race, nation, class and so on and as an intersectional category elaborated.

One main goal is to understand gender and religion as discursive, performative categories of knowledge production. The categories gender and religion are not only deconstructed and deessentialised, but consistently denaturalised and disidentified in order to overcome epistemic violence. Furthermore, religion – conceptualised as a category of knowledge – can contribute not only to the individual but also to the collective gain in agency. It is shown how religion can contribute to the social imaginary.

2 On the situatedness of knowledge production and intentions of the investigation

The historicity of knowledge in the humanities and social and natural sciences was discussed by Gaston Bachelard¹⁴ and Georges Canguilhem.¹⁵ From a feminist perspective, it was formulated as “situated knowledge” by Donna Haraway¹⁶ and “activist knowledge” by Sara Ahmed,¹⁷ who helped to understand that it is not “nature” that formulates natural laws but that “knowledge” is produced in social processes under material conditions. The concept of epistemology is used in this book in the footsteps of Eve Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet”¹⁸ with reference to the French tradition of epistemology as the reflection on the historical and material conditions under which the process of scientific inquiry takes place and shifts.

The book is located on the one hand in debates on religion, gender and orientalism¹⁹ and on the question of the constructive character of religion and gender. On the other hand, discussions about the new role of religion in the public sphere in the context of post-secular interventions are taken into consideration.²⁰ Hierarchical gender constructions are especially evident in societies in transition, and it is revealed that religion is increasingly serving as a realm of constructing inclusion or exclusion in communities. Therefore, the study looks especially at societies in transition in the 20th and 21st centuries. The publication focuses on the new role of religion and gender in the public sphere in Europe, the U.S.A. and the African context. It analyses the interdependence of religion, gender and neo-nationalisms. Furthermore, it scrutinises biopolitical interferences of nation states and dominant political and religious institutions. The study is especially interested in counter-discourses and different ways of gaining agency. It elaborates different spaces of activism and agency as, for instance, in Eastern European dissidence and particularly in the Peaceful Revolution of 1989 in Germany and in the locally and globally acting Occupy Wall Street movement. The book thematises religion, gender, visual culture and performativity after the post-secular turn in Europe with an excursion to Mali. It investigates the construction of gender, religion and sexuality within international instruments like the Human Rights Codex and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The examples of discourse analysis enable a critique of religion and gender which reaches beyond the historical context.

With these case studies in mind, the book attempts to elaborate an epistemological concept for the theoretisation of religion and gender. The project is embedded in questions of the historical, cultural and philosophical constructive character of religion, including the question of exclusion and inclusion mechanisms in the context of the emergence of “religion” as a “category”²¹ with Daniel Boyarin and David Chidester and in “religious paradigms”²² as Bee Scherer asks. Additionally, the poststructuralist approaches that use the term “imagined communities”, according to Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking study on the constructive cha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface to the series
• Preface to the volume
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Theory of religion as theory of knowledge
• PART II Religion, secularity and gender after the post-secular turn
• PART III Religion, gender, neo-nationalisms and biopolitics
• PART IV Religion, gender, activism and the multiplicity of agency
• PART V Religion, gender, visual culture and performativity
• Index