Dr Anupama Ranawana - The 2024 Edward Bailey Keynote

Dr Anupama Ranawana, St Andrew's University, Scotland will deliver "“I have told you already, it is there”: Anticolonial internationalism in feminist faith based storytellers of 1960s-1980s Asia.” the 2024 Edward Bailey Keynote.

CALL FOR PAPERS Deadline

Please submit your proposals by 27 March 2024

Call For Papers - Implicit Religion - UK 2024

Gender as a social and religious construct is continually produced, consumed and represented in scholarship, popular culture, national legislation, educational resources, missionary fields and a multitude of religious communities, as well as communities shaped by experiences deemed religious (Taves, 2009). How have women, non-binary and gender queer people portrayed themselves or others throughout the centuries in transnational, diasporic, and trans-historical spaces, especially religious spaces? How are their struggles, battles, and successes depicted in the context of fluid linguistic, trans-historical, and transnational cultural identities? How do women, non-binary and gender queer people use, interact with, shape, act without regard for, or reject religion or experiences deemed religious to interpolate, challenge, frame, and negotiate the patriarchal, or other, system with its societal and cultural expectations about them? Moreover, what role does the body (abled or disabled), cultural capital, geographic movement / displacement, cultural changes or desires, political will or resistance, or class privilege or displacement play in the context of female, non-binary and gender queer subjectivity and agency?

Scholarship demonstrates the vital importance of exploring agency and representation in relation to gender and religion, or experiences deemed religious. For example, Moultrie (2017) explores the impact of faith-based sexual ministries on Black women's sexual agency to trace how these women navigate sexuality, religious authority, and their spiritual walk with God. Advancing a womanist sexual ethics, Moultrie reframes biblical interpretations and conceptions of what constitutes a healthy relationship to provide a basis for sexual decision making that does not privilege monogamy or deny female pleasure.  Snorton (2017) identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Snorton attends to how enslavement and the production of racialised gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable, making it clear the multitude of roles that religion played within this.

How can we as scholars of religion better understand the gendered practices and identities that those we study are engaged in or attempt to force onto others if we incorporate agency and representation into our research design and analysis? What role can the analytical tools of Implicit Religion: Commitment, Integrating Foci, & Intensive Concerns with Extensive Effects, play in helping us to better undertake that research design and analysis‍‍

We are interested in, but not limited to, proposals that address one or more of the following:

• Feminist and / or Queer perspectives of non-Anglo-American traditions, such as African, Caribbean, Indigenous, Chinese, Malaysian, Philippine, Korean, Islamic, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu and Buddhist, syncretic, religious communities, groups, subcultures, institutions or those shaped by an experience deemed religious.
• Women, non-binary and gender fluid people’s agency within or without regard for patriarchal structures and the role of religion or experiences deemed religious in supporting, sustaining or resisting either agency or structures (or both).
• Transgender representation and agency within or without regard for patriarchal structures and / or religious structures.
• Notions and representations of the ‘well behaved woman’ within different times, communities and religious groups, organisations or nations, and/or disregard for these idealizations.
• The ‘re-presentation’ of the trope of the ‘well behaved woman’ amongst 21^st century scholarship, national legislation, education settings and white supremacy groups, and/or disregard for these idealizations.
• The agency and/ or representation of migrant or refugee women and non-binary people, and the communities they form, shape or retain in relation to religion or experiences deemed religious.
• The intersection of gender and disability and what impact it has on agency and/ or representation within or without regard for either religious communities, communities shaped by an experience deemed religious, or those who create or curate scholarship, museum exhibits etc on or through the use of the bodies of such individuals.
• The intersection of gender and race and what impact it has on agency and/ or representation within or without regard for either religious communities, communities shaped by an experience deemed religious, or those who create or curate scholarship, museum exhibits etc on or through the use of the bodies of such individuals.

Please note successful proposals will incorporate an Implicit Religion perspective in the design of the underlying study and address in part or in concert: Commitment, Integrating Foci, & Intensive Concerns with Extensive Effects,

References

Moultrie, Monique. 2017. Passionate and Pious: Religious Media and Black Women's Sexuality. Duke University Press.
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Snorton, Riley C. 2017, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minnesota University Press.
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Taves, Ann. 2009, Religious Experiences Reconsidered. Princeton University Press.