Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/13

Rh especially ones that can retain these positive insights, while escaping the obsessive focus on the human-world gap.

An Object-Oriented Study of Religion and Gender

Converting readers to particular metaphysical frameworks is not the intent of this article. The extensive arguments of Bennett, Harman, Bryant and others need to be individually examined and weighed in this regard. What is crucial, is that an ethos or promise of doing justice to reality is taken seriously. The proposal is simply that new possibilities of thought may be opened up by shifting emphasis from epistemology to metaphysics. Speculative metaphysics may seem a kind of wager, but its rapprochement with reality may pay considerable returns, particularly when compared with the diminishing returns of anthropocentric critiques.

What might any of this mean for the study of religion and gender? What might be the methodological affordances, problems or dilemmas? A provisional sketch of some directions and research programs is offered in what follows. Rather than attempting to incorporate continental and speculative realism as a whole, its focus is directed toward object-oriented ontology. This choice is based on my familiarity with it and the knowledge that some applications of this approach have already started to appear across the arts and humanities. The 24th Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in 2010, for example, featured two panels under the heading of object-oriented feminism, including papers on topics such as Botox and plastic surgery, software design, transgenic technologies, and the corset. There would seem to be capacity for the implementation of similar approaches at the interface of religious studies and gender studies too.

The practical first step toward applying object oriented approaches to the humanities, arts and social sciences is decentring the human. Thus, while the primary subject of analysis in the study of religion and gender may have been gender bias, object oriented ontology requires the displacement of human bias. This may include: the removal of the human as primary focus of attention; the human as the only or primary source of agency; and the human as the only or primary source of value. What then follows from this decentring? Arguably, the primary outcome is enhanced sensitivity to the affects and powers of objects, specifically to construct, 56