Orit Avishai

In Religion and Gender ’s fifteenth year, this roundtable piece by the editors reflects on our history and the times in which we are working. The piece responds to three questions: 1) How has the scholarly field developed during the first fifteen years of Religion and Gender ? 2) How can we respond to the current economic and political context? 3) What challenges and opportunities does the future hold for religion and gender scholarship, and for our journal? In this roundtable, the editors of the journal come together to reflect on the past and look to the future.

This review essay of Nella van den Brandt’s Religion, Gender, and Race in Western Europe discusses how the volume explores the construction, destabilization, and reimagining of Western European concepts of religion, gender, and race, as well as the ethical responsibilities inherent in critically engaging with these frameworks.

The day following Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, around 1 percent of the American population gathered in Washington DC for the Women’s March, potentially the largest single-day protest in the country’s history. But those hoping for a revived, unified left were disillusioned when movement leaders fell into discord, in part because white movement leaders were insufficiently attuned to the perspectives of women of color, including Muslim women, and in part because of some movement leaders’ stances on the Israel/Palestine question. Many observers mourned the movement’s failed—or unrealized—solidarity, but as Juliane Hammer argues in chapter 2 of this excellent volume, the movement is best seen as neither the epitome of feminist intersectional solidarity nor as an example of its utter failure. Rather, the Women’s March, like two other case studies featured in the volume—Muslim Iranian and Turkish women activists’ inability to support one another vis-à-vis oppressive national regimes (chapter 1) and the politics of race and the Israel/Palestine question (chapter 3)—provides an entry point for assessing the obstacles that impede feminist and other forms of progressive solidarity as well as religion’s absence from intersectional analysis. Together, these case studies, along with two chapters that shed light on how activists may overcome such obstacles, address a perennial question that haunts those working for progressive social change: Why can’t marginalized groups who ostensibly share similar aims unite to forge real and lasting solidarities that will help them overcome and undo structures of oppression?

In the popular imagination, Evangelical Christianity is a patriarchal religion whose traditions and lasting legacies perpetuate a singular patriarchal social order. However, as Lisa Weaver Swartz reveals in this meticulously researched book about women in church leadership, Evangelicalism tells two very different gendered stories—one complementarian and one egalitarian. The tragedy is that the egalitarian story too marginalizes women by privatizing gender difference. Weaver Swartz enters the much-trodden terrain of the Evangelical gendered world order with a lived religion lens and a focus on the training of future Church leaders in two Evangelical flagship seminaries, Southern Baptist and Ashbury. Located in close geographical proximity in Kentucky, the seminaries are a world apart theologically on the question of women’s church leadership. Southern subscribes to complementarianism—a theological view that men and women have different but complementary roles and responsibilities. It does not ordain women nor allow them to hold positions of power within the church (or the seminary); women are found in administrative offices and in student housing on the edge of campus, where students’ wives typically carry the burden of supporting their families while their husbands pursue their seminary training. Ashbury is a Wesleyan Methodist seminary that prides itself on its international reach and rejection of complementarianism and prescribed gendered roles. Yet women comprise only 34% of students and 16% of faculty. As it interrogates how these institutions create, maintain, and transmit Evangelical gendered stories to future leaders, Stained Glass Ceilings sheds light on how male power is perpetuated and embodied in white Evangelical institutions.

A key thread of research on how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons of faith navigate and make sense of gender and sexual identities and desires that defy their religious traditions’ teachings focuses on identity conflict, management, negotiation, and reconciliation. Drawing on interviews with 64 Orthodox Jewish same‐sex attracted persons in Israel, supplemented by physical and digital ethnographic data, I argue that the conflict frame is empirically imprecise and conceptually flawed. I demonstrate fluidity and ambivalence vis‐à‐vis religiosity and sexual identity and argue that ambivalence is generative: In the process of making sense of their sexual and religious selves, my respondents challenge what it means to be Orthodox and what it means to be same‐sex attracted, thereby challenging the conflict frame's categorical schema. I then make the case for a more contextualized and dynamic framework for theorizing LGBT negotiations of religious and sexual identities. I also observe that the limitations of the conflict lens are symptomatic of broader tendencies in the sociology of religion to rely on U.S. and Christian cases and a pattern of limited engagement with work in other disciplines and subdisciplines.

Feminist sociologists claim that while feminist insights have been incorporated in sociological paradigms and women sociologists have been well-integrated into academia, sociological frameworks have not been transformed, a process known as the missing feminist revolution. Yet, few have examined how the missing feminist revolution operates in specific subdisciplines and the mechanisms that sustain it. This article undertakes these tasks by analyzing religion and gender scholarship published in six sociology journals over the past 32 years. We find evidence of partial integration and continued marginalization. However, we also document disparate networks of interlocutors that operate in two distinct intellectual fields—religion and gender. We argue that this bifurcation partially explains the missing feminist revolution and that insularity of feminist conversations likely contributes to this process. Our findings shed light on obstacles to transforming mainstream disciplines.

This symposium considers the potential of religion cases for social theory. I approach this question from the perspective of a subdiscipline that has been relatively successful at this endeavor—scholarship on gender and religion. I trace the history of this research and then discuss three bodies of scholarship that engage core concerns in gender studies: agency, feminist activism, and masculinity. I organize my discussion as “lessons” for gender scholars who are not religion experts and consider how religion cases can enrich gender studies, noting that the three strands of scholarship have varied in their impact. I argue that the continued legacies of the feminist dilemma of religion—assumptions about religion’s inherent incompatibility with the interests of women and gender and sexual minorities that results in ambivalence and hostility toward studying religion and learning from religion cases—partially explains the difference between the cases. My analysis suggests broader lessons about the institutional and intellectual conditions that facilitate or thwart effective cross-fertilization.