Page:Vital New Matters - The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender.pdf/6

Rh relevance of this be for the study of religion and gender? There has often been a valuable interchange between continental philosophy, religious studies and gender studies. But metaphysical speculation may sit rather less well with disciplines and subjects that have favoured epistemological questions and their own projects of critique.

The Gender-Critical Turn

The core insights of the gender-critical turn in religious studies warrant little historical and systematic elaboration here. It was only during the relatively recent past, notably the late 1970s, that numbers of academics began to deploy gender theoretical perspectives within the field of religious studies. This was initially driven by a feminist identification and critique of the gender bias and blindness operative within both religious studies and the traditions that were its subject. This, though, was soon overtaken by a more wide-ranging application of gender analysis, an application that some confidently claimed to signal a paradigm shift in the study of religions. Ursula King, for example, writing in 1995, outlined four dimensions of the imminent disciplinary upheaval. First a descriptive dimension, arising from the discovery and generation of new data, experiences, materials and questions provided by gender analysis. Second, a negative-critical dimension, emerging from the deconstruction and hermeneutical interrogation of religious and scholarly texts and traditions through a gender-sensitive lens. Third, a positive-critical dimension entailing the reconstruction of religions along gender informed and sensitized lines. And fourth, a methodological dimension, building on the aforementioned identification of gender bias and blindness, but quickly moving to transform research programmes and methods through the integration and application of gender theory. It remains to be answered to what extent this global shift and transformation of religious studies has occurred.

What is beyond doubt is that the theorization of religion and gender proved to be a dynamic and fertile area of academic activity, stimulating heated philosophical and religious debates, promoting original inter- and transdisciplinary dialogues and projects, and pushing methodological reflexivity to ever higher levels of intensity. In its short history, the study of religion and gender has not stood still, or avoided the expansion of its concerns, or resisted the need to substantially revise its 49