Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/15

Rh construal of religions as multidimensional organisms, for example, encompasses both of these possibilities, by listing the material, textual, experiential and performative dimensions that need to be considered in order to grasp a religion in its unity. Smart’s model of religion has suffered extensive criticism since its inception, perhaps especially because of its phenomenological underpinnings, but it is remarkably amenable to an object-oriented approach, especially one that is prepared to view religions as a complex assemblages, comprised of countless other objects.

The question of whether one can usefully retain gender in an object-oriented analysis is perhaps more contentious. The fact that gender studies start with a human subject implies an already given enthrallment to the correlationism that the speculative turn aspires to bypass. An approach that is opposed to anthropocentrism might be expected to exhibit a disinterest in, or else a distancing from, analyses of gender. What precisely could an object-oriented approach to gender look like? The points that follow indicate a way forwards, but they are proposals and hypotheses at best. First, there is no denial within object-oriented ontology that objects are acted upon and affect one another; objects do relate to one another, but they are not defined by, or reducible to, their relations. Second, it remains the case that humans as objects are differentially acted upon in accordance with such factors as the kind of objects that they are – for example, female, male, old, young, diseased, healthy – and also the kind of object that they are identified as being. Third, humans are also members of larger objects, such as organizations, religions and societies, just as they are, in part, comprised of smaller objects, such as bacteria and microbes. None of these points denies the existence of gender or rides rough-shod over any specific tools of gender analysis. What an object-oriented ontology does is multiply the number of actants and objects that participate in the construction of gendered individuals. Social constructivism may have accommodated such considerations as age, class, ethnicity, race and sexuality within its analyses, object-oriented ontology ratchets up the complexity and intensity of the constructivism by bringing many additional objects to the table for inclusion.

The only significant object-oriented discomfort that may afflict students of religion and gender is likely to arise from the point that causal authority no longer rests with the human. The sovereignty of human intent 58