Episode 205: Gender, Sexuality, & Religion in what’s now the U.S.
Transcript!
PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.
Shownotes
(because citations are political)
After two episodes specifically parsing and giving examples on race and religion--and how if you’re not thinking race whilst thinking religion (and frankly if you’re not thinking religion whilst thinking race) you’re doing it all wrong. And now we’re gonna say the same stuff but about sex and gender! New things to grump about! That’s our favorite.
The thesis is gender and religion are co-constitutive: we learn how to do gender in part through religious frameworks and we learn how to do religion in ways that are specific to our gender(s) and gender and religion influence and reinforce and shape and reshape each other.
The keywords this time were call backs! Find them in our glossary. They were:
social construct, gender, patriarchy
The 101:
(where we did the professor-work)
This whole episode revolves around how gender and sexuality are always part of the conversation about religion. That’s true the world over, but this episode focuses on the U.S.
Don’t remember or didn’t tune in to E201? No worries, we got you, definitionally:
Gender:
Megan did math at us (the nerve! the genius!) about gender. She said:
Gender is identity assigned at birth (sex, the meaning we’ve assigned to specific body parts) + desire (whom/how/what/if you want to do with those parts) + expression (how you signal your identity & relationship with your body) + culture (how your expression of your identity & relationship with your body gets read by those around you).
Sex/uality: assumptions about what bodies are for and what we should want to do (or not) with/on/in/to/around our own bodies and the bodies of others. Driving assumption in a lot of cultures is that our bodies are in large part MEANT to make more bodies.
Assumptions about sexuality shape our understandings of gender.
One we redefined our terms, we moved into what Megan called a pastiche of gender and sexuality and religion, moving more or less chronologically but leaving out infinity other examples, because, y’know, time constraints. Here’s a smattering:
1692: The witches—or lack thereof—in Salem.
Puritans thought the literal Devil accessed your soul through your body. Women’s bodies, they insisted, were weaker (despite knowing those bodies make fucking babies, which is metal AF). Weaker body = easier access to the soul = women just like naturally more inclined toward making pacts with the Devil.
Megan teaches a whole fantastic class on witches. The syllabus, nerds, is here.
1851: Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio.
Truth gives this speech which is rendered in a patois Ilyse called linguistic blackface. Check out the difference between how the white suffragettes printed her speech vs. what the speech was, here. So you can see it RIGHT NOW, here’s a side-by-side excerpt (via The Sojourner Truth Project):
Sojourner Truth, continued:
As promised, so that we can continue to see how the white women heroines of US history were often also racist AF, here’s Suffragettes Who Sucked.
1878: Reynolds v. US — that is, Mormons and Polygyny
SCOTUS tells the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (which is only about 50 years old at this point) that they can BELIEVE whatever they like but Mormon dudes can’t marry more than one woman at a time (no matter how much Biblical patriarchs did it first and also a lot)
Religious freedom, in this instance, is mediated through white mainstream Christian sexual morality (that says stuff like “you can’t marry more than one woman at a time, Mormon dudes”)
So many other things in this pastiche!
1770ish: Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, realizing late in her life that she was the reincarnation of Christ!
1848: The Oneida community deciding that the key to health and salvation was edging and non-monogamy!
20th & 21st C: The intersection of queer liberation movements and religion, making more space for queer Muslims, Jews, and Christians!
Mid-20th C: Goddess-worship making a big comeback in the US!
20th C and ongoing: Black and Latinx and Black Latinx Americans reclaiming or building new connections to Africana religions and female orishas (including Beyonce)!
2015: Bree Newsome pulling down that confederate flag in Charleston after the massacre at Mother Emmanuel while declaring “You come at me in the name of hatred, oppression and violence. I come at you in the name of God! THIS FLAG COMES DOWN TODAY!”
Ilyse added to Megan’s quilt with
Clara Lemlich, Jews, and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union.
amina wadud (who does not capitalize her names), Muslim leadership and textual interpretation, and feminism.
Primary Sources:
(because we, too, exist in the world we’re describing)
Megan riffed on one of her favorite American religious leaders, Zikala-Sa’s very famous essay “Why I am a Pagan,” talking about why she identifies religiously as pagan, what that means for her as a gendered human, and more.
Ilyse further took the riff and made her primary source “Why I am a Yenta,” thinking through how gendered cultural practices that can be damaging (complimentary gender roles, women’s labor, etc.) can also be sites of resistance, organization, and power.
Ilyse made Megan cry with her impassioned walk down identity/memory lane, so hold onto those butts, nerds.
Story Time:
(citing our theoretical influences)
This episode, we read Caroline Walker Bynum’s introduction to the game-changing volume Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols. Gender and Religion (1986).
In Gender and Religion, Bynum writes:
“It is no longer possible to study religious practice or religious symbols without taking gender - that is, the cultural experience of being male or female - into account. In exploring the relationship between gender and religion, the authors of this volume insist upon two fundamental insights. First, they insist upon the feminist insight that all human beings are"gendered" - that is, that there is no such thing as generic homo religiosus. No scholar studying religion, no participant in ritual, is ever neuter. Religious experience is the experience of men and women, and in no known society is this experience the same,” (2).
Both Megan and Ilyse talked about the historical location of this text in two main ways:
1) gender binary language is period-appropriate even if we don’t like, support, or use it
2) That it was straight-up radical to point out that bodies have gender, and that because bodies have gender, when we think about how bodies do religion we need to consider gender.
Megan also reminded us that when this was published, Yale’s Divinity School had only had a women’s restroom for about a decade. Meaning that for a woman like Bynum, who finished her PhD at Harvard in 1969, women were so unthinkable in some spaces as to literally not have access to a toilet. Don’t believe us? Receipts:
Homework!
(that’s right, nerds, there’s always more to learn)
You know the drill by now. There’s so, so much more. We recommended a lot of books this go ‘round, so we tried to also hook you up with interviews, book reviews, and other media in case you or your local library doesn’t have a copy.
Megan recommends:
Carolyn Walker Bynum, of course, as she is iconic
Anne Braude, “Women’s history IS American religious history,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History (2017)
Anthony Petro, After the Wrath of God (2015)
A review of it with text details is here.
New Books Network Podcast interview is here.
Monique Moultrie, Passionate & Pious (2017)
Helpful review here.
Lynne Gerber, Seeking the Straight & Narrow (2011)
Kent Brintnall, Ecce Homo (2011)
Amy DeRogatis, Saving Sex (2014)
Heather White, Reforming Sodom (2015)
Mark Jordan does not need recommendation, but here we are.
My own NAASR paper, “The Field Which is Not One / The Body is Smart: Rethinking Theory in Religious Studies,” (2018)
Ilyse assigns:
Sylvia Chan-Malik’s Being Muslim: a Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam.
Video interview (with captioning) on Left of Black with Mark Anthony Neal.
Sara Ahmed, especially Living A Feminist Life.
Short video interview with Sonali Kolhatkar (Rising Up with Sonali).
Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages.
Ashon T. Crawley’s The Lonely Letters was gripping.
And I want to assign Higher Ground, which is a film based on a memoir about religiously-sanctioned sexism. It’s older & I think you’ll need to rent it because it isn’t freely streaming. Massive set of trigger warnings for abuse. But: it does the work of how religion and gender are tied up, all the time, forever. Info on it here.