Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/16

Rh is overturned by object-oriented ontology. All objects may affect, construct and translate one another; or, if one favours Bennett’s work, one would need to take account of different degrees of agency. If implementing an object-oriented study of Roman Catholicism, for example, it might be just as reasonable to be concerned with the affects and causal powers of cassocks, cathedrals and church mice, as with those of clerics, choirs and creeds. Fortunately, studies in this genre are not wholly without precedent within religious studies and the humanities. From Elisabeth Eisenstein’s systematic two volume analysis of the revolutionary agentic role of the printing press in the Reformation, through to Marcella Althaus-Reid’s evocative and queer opening meditation on lemons, odours and underwear in Indecent Theology, it is clear that there are starting points for object-oriented forays into religion and gender. One might want a more prescriptive agenda, a refined set of procedures, or else clearly defined set of outcomes in place before beginning such studies. However, as Michael O’Rourke has argued, drawing on Agamben’s concept of ‘the open,’ ‘[t]here can be no program for what ... speculative realism or object oriented approaches do. They are not means to an end, but rather means “without end.”’ This assertion speaks to the complex, queer and weird entites with which one may inevitably need to grapple with these approaches. Similar to the bridgehead problem in anthropology, one may need to deploy a hermeneutical to-and-fro search in order to start to make sense of one’s environment. Except, in this sense, one is engaged in a ‘hermeneutics of the real’, rather than one of cultural signs, signifiers and symbols alone. In the following section I share some research notes on my efforts to import an object-oriented approach into the field of religious studies with which I am most familiar: the Goddess movement. This is not, I stress, a neatly packaged case study, it is rather a work in progress that has recently considered object-oriented perspectives in order to see what emerges.

A Girl’s Best Friend and Webs of Power

The Goddess movement was one of several religious movements that coalesced during the 1970s and 1980s. Taking impetus from the women’s movement and new social movements for peace, ecology and alternative 59