Episode 201: Race, Gender, & Sexuality: What’s Religion Got to Do with ‘Em?
Transcript!
PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.
Shownotes (because citations are political)
We set up the season in this episode! Religion is part of things like race, gender, sex—how those terms get deployed, defined, bent in various places but religion is, also, separate from those terms, even if the ideas are inextricable. We’ll argue all season that we need to think about religion is part of and how it acts upon (yet remains separate from) race, gender, and sex, so that we can understand religion in all its permutations better!
We had a number of keywords this time! Find them in our glossary. They were:
social construct, racialization, race, gender
The 101:
where we did the professor-work
This whole episode revolves around preliminary definitions that you know we’ll complicate and add to and problematize for the rest of the season. The premise more or less? That we can’t separate our gender, sex, race, religion from each other. These are all happening at once, in our persons, and they are shaped further by when we live, the class(es) we have access to, our health and ability status—all of it.
We tried to set the stage for our key terms (race, gender, and sex) with some first-go definitions.
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).
Megan cited her sources and pulled from these resources:
Gender Unicorn (courtesy of Trans Student Educational Resources)
Genderbread Person (Sam Killermann)
Megan also said that there are three major points about gender (in addition to the handy-dandy formula above) that we will be stressing all season:
Gender is a thing we made it up. Gender is meaning we make on and about our bodies.
When we’re talking about gender, we’re never JUST talking about gender.
Gender is tied up in how we think they should do sexuality. Gender starts, not with identification of body parts, but with assumptions about what those body parts are for and what we should therefore want to do with them: which is to say, make more bodies.
Just because we made it up doesn’t mean gender (or race, or sexuality) are “fake” or don’t matter.
Doing gender (or race, or sexuality) wrong has real world consequences; people kill other people for doing gender wrong. Social construct doesn’t mean fake -- but it DOES mean that we can learn to make NEW meanings of bodies, and hopefully make more space for us to be different from one another safely.
Is this all there is? Of course not. But this is a terms-overview moment, not an entire category in the Library of Congress system, y’all.
Then we tackled race.
Ilyse said:
Like gender, race is a social concept and construct, often defined as a group of people who share characteristics.
In the US, we’re good at thinking race = skin color. Of course that’s part of it! But that’s not all of it. Race has historically been a social construct that incopropartes physical (often called “phenotypical”) features alongside harder-to-quantify ideas about (assumed!) behaviors, demeanors, capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.
These harder-to-quantify ideas are the stuff of how race theory works. It isn’t just that skin tone (whiteness) is valued over others. It’s that whiteness came to be affiliated with desirable traits—and things beyond whiteness were labeled undesirable. Difference isn’t the problem with race; the problem has been valuation and the violent enforcement of “good” and “bad” racial categories.
Yes, nerds: this is how religions are racialized—how religions come to be part of what we consider race. We’ll get to this!
But wait: what’s racialization?
Racialization is the process that marks individuals as having immutable traits because of their membership in a particular group. Racialization identifies individuals as both belonging to one cogent group and possessing those inherent, hereditary, and prognostic characteristics. This is why Freud wasn’t protected by his Christmas tree.
Primary Sources:
because we, too, exist in the world we’re describing
Megan talked about “not feeling oppressed” to the eminent scholars of gender and religion Virginia Burrus and Traci West. She also pointed out that this is precisely what learning is for: knowing more, knowing better, doing better, doing more.
Ilyse talked about racialization and Judaism in her specific experience as an adopted kid (because if racialization can be phenotypical, not-matching one’s parents is a trip).
Story Time:
close reads of leading scholars
At long last, we are actually reading from Judith Weisenfeld’s scholarship rather than just pointing to it and drawing on it. Megan cheated a bit and cited two of Prof. Weisenfeld’s pieces:
In New World A-Coming, Weisenfeld writes:
“I use the term ‘religio- racial identity’ to capture the commitment of members of [innovative Black religions during the early-to-mid 20th century] to understanding individual and collective identity as constituted in the conjunction of religion and race...In some sense, all religious groups in the United States could be characterized as religio- racial ones, given the deeply powerful, if sometimes veiled, ways the American system of racial hierarchy has structured religious beliefs, practices, and institutions for all people in its frame.” (5)
But since Megan and Ilyse use Weisenfeld—and especially the frame of “religio-racial” perhaps differently than the original text, we also cited Weisenfeld’s recent article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, ““The House We Live In,” where she elaborates that she:
“insist[s] on continuing to develop approaches to the study of religion that attend to the kinds of questions about difference and power that the study of race and religion affords and that prioritize the voices and experiences of historically marginalized people in our theoretical frames.” (456)
Both Megan and Ilyse fawned over these works because they do such important work: they are historically meticulous but also theoretically expansive. Anything that helps us think is the bees’ knees.
Homework!
that’s right, nerds, there’s always more to learn
It’s a new semester! The faculty are excited! We’re no different, sorry about it.
Ilyse went ham and assigned far too much:
For some bigger picture theories of race in the US, Omi and Winant are a classic sociology standard.
No access to the book? Here’s a video interview that’s worthwhile.
Moustafa Bayoumi’s “Racing Religion” traces the legal history of who can count as a citizen in the US—and thus shows how race isn’t just color or national origins but also religion.
Todne Thomas has a really fantastic recorded lecture “Abstracting, Resurrecting, and Profaning Sacred Matter: Black Church Arson in the Museum.” This is seminar-level knowledge-dropping.
Edward Curtis IV is a really prominent historian of religion and Black Islams, he’s got a ton of books worth checking out, but available on the webs is a piece he wrote for Humanities Futures, “Black History, Islam, and the Future of Humanities Beyond White Supremacy.”
The Immanent Frame did a series called “a universe of terms,” and the “race” entry is good! It features two scholars of Islam that I find indispensible--Sylvia Chan-Malik and Junaid Rana--as well as Katharine Gerbner.
Also, check out NPR’s Code Switch podcast. They’re doing really smart work on race. But specifically, I just listened to this one on an Arab Muslim confronting anti-Blackness, and I think it’s instructive of the ways in which race, religion, and racialization can impact folks and still mete out racist ends. Un-HolyLand? An Arab Muslim Reckoning With Racism
Megan whined about how much Ilyse assigned and kept it relatively together:
Megan compiled a list of resources worth your time this past summer with Yohana Agra Junker called “This is Not an Antiracist Reading List: Or, the Treachery of Allyship.”
If you’re just starting to think about gender/sexuality and religion, Megan really likes Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s “Gender: Being It or Doing It?”
And obviously all of the Judith Weisenfeld, both New World and “House We Live In” (linked above).
Can’t get the book? Here’s ways in:
“Writing a New History of Black Religion: An Author’s Response” to the Online Roundtable on New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration on Black Perspectives.
And, we we said, Weisenfeld’s done a ton of public-facing work on film, space/place, and (obvs) race and American religion. Have some:
In the Immanent Frame series Ilyse recommended: “Space, Place.”
On religion at the museum: “Religion on Display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture,” Sacred Matters, January 3, 2017.
On Birth of a Nation: “A Dreadful and Improbable Creature: Race, Aesthetics, and the Burdens of Greatness,” Sacred Matters roundtable on The Birth of a Nation at 100, April 21, 2016.
Grant funded!
Starting with this very episode, Keeping it 101 is funded in part by a New England Humanities Consortium 2020 Seed Grant. This grant makes possible the support required to offer accessible transcripts, including both software and human-power in the form of UVM undergraduate Katherine Brennan.
