Episode 206: Religion & Gender in Not-the-US

Transcript!

PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.

Shownotes
(because citations are political)

In this episode, we’re going to talk about religion, sex, and gender through a big ol’ tour of the world. In the last episode, we centered the US—but we know that there are many more places in the world than our collective home. It’s a train ride! All aboard to listen to us think about how religion, gender, and sex are all playing together--nicely and otherwise--in a bunch of locations, spanning religious affiliation.

The keywords we review this time! Find them in our glossary. They were:

  • social construct, sexuality, gender

The 101:

(where we did the professor-work)

ALL ABOARD this TRAIN THEMED EPISODE

ALL ABOARD this TRAIN THEMED EPISODE

  • Our train ride around the world through gender, sexuality, and religion is a SHOCK AND AWE with information precisely so we can show you how gender is, at once, subject to global patterns within its own systems (like religion, like imperialism, like a particular religious practice) and utterly, totally malleable based on location, era, language, race, etc.

    • As a reminder, the shock and awe is a tool Ilyse came up with--black humor utterly laid out--in her classes and here on the pod as a way to highlight just how big, how much, how vast the examples can be. It’s never meant to be comprehensive. It is, instead, meant to inundate and overwhelm: in doing this, I hope to give some specific examples as a way to show you the overall, inescapable pattern.

  • The thesis today is, of course, that religion, gender, and sex are always in the mix, about every single topic we can imagine. So if you think about religion and don’t think sex or gender, you’re doing it wrong.

  • First stop: IMPERIALISM.

    • white Christian Europeans made gender A Thing, ONE thing, often as part of white Christian supremacist notions of “good” and “correct” bodies. Because when we’re talking gender--like all these social constructs--we’re talking power. 

      • Most societies have had a sense of gender and sex, though sexuality is a modern concept.

      • On gender: There have been ideas that “women” exist and that they are different from “men” who also exist. It’s just that what it has meant to “be a woman” or “be a man” and that those are the only options has changed radically over time, radically between societies, and has always been in tension in contemporaneous settings.

      • On sexuality: it’s more dicey, historically, because it really is a new concept. Heterosexuality--and explicitly, the idea of sex as a function of reproduction--has been assumed and regulated. However, the identity marker of “homosexual” (to be historical) or “gay” or “LGBTQ”? These are new even if, for example, men having sex with men is absolutely ancient.

  • Second stop: BE A BETTER READER — TEXTS TELL US THAT GENDER WAS NEVER CLEAN, STANDARD, OR IDEAL.

    • Ilyse actually said when you read the Bible and see women being told not to “wild about,” we need to read critically and know that that means that women were definitely wilding about.

      • Ilyse told us this is because we do not tell quiet children to be quiet. In other words: we do not correct behavior that does not exist incorrectly. So when we see “ideal” genders being portrayed, when we hear admonishments of “correct” behavior, critical reading tells us that “incorrect” “unideal” behaviors were prevalent enough to merit correction. Gender is policed, navigated, enforced—it is anything, literally anything, but natural. (Because, duh, if it were natural, it would not demand any of this maintenance!)

  • Third & fourth stops: SOUTH ASIA. (C’mon what’d you expect?)

    • STOP THE THIRD: IRMF talked sati or suttee, the practice of wife immolation in some Hindu traditions and histories.

      • Banning Sati becomes imagined as a triumph for women’s rights in British India--it is first banned in Bengal in 1829--but, like, lurking behind this win is some devious imperialist crap that shows how complicated the intersections of race and gender and power are.

      • At the same time that the suffrage movement is happening & is yielding violent opposition in Britain, Brits are all up in South Asia liberating women from their oppressive men. In short? This stop has a lot to do with how Brits used religion, race, and gender to prove the “backwardness” of Hindus—disguised as “saving” Hindu women (from their men, their culture, themselves). All the while, Brits are denying British women rights, at home and in the colonies.

      • For a wee bit more, see “How Did Sati Get Abolished in India,” by Kanksha Raina.

    • Fourth stop: Megan knew a thing about South Asia, and talked us through hijra.

      • Hijra refers to India’s relatively well-known and certainly well-documented third gender community.

        • It’s an historical term, policed and mediated for centuries, recognized on driver’s licenses (which is to say: legal and official), and a fixation for many non-Indian/non-South Asian scholars, activists, and queer/trans/nonbinary folks.

        • Folks tend to fixate as a way to prove that gender isn’t binary! That gender is part of imperialism! That binary gender is an imposition on many communities and cultures!

          • This is great, right? Maybe: we suggested that while it is true that hijra are a third gender, demonstrate how imperialism and its white Christian norms aimed to control and “correct” anything beyond those norms, and offer vocabulary for queer/trans/nonbinary folk elsewhere it is also true that non-South Asian folk are obsessed with hijra communities within terms that hijra themselves do not typically prioritize. TL;DR: hijra communities prioritize cultures of reciprocal respect over and above sexuality, and pigeon holing them into The OG Trans Activists (TM) is (sorry about it) a facet of Orientalist gaze. (Check the homework for more on this!)

  • Fifth stop: EVERYWHERE — WE’RE TALKING HIJAB.

    • Ilyse & Megan eye-rolled a little over hijab, because when anyone talks religion and gender someone always mentions hijab, and a little piece of both of them dies. As if religion and gender were as boring as what women choose to wear. Sigh.

    • Hijab is interesting precisely because it is regulated differently in state laws (in France types of coverings are prohibited while in Iran they are mandated) and interpreted differently over time and space by Muslims (so there are exactly eleventy bajillion ways to cover) and then there is also fashion—its tricky, ever-changing cultural nuances—to think through and about.

      • Also, rules and attitudes about hijab have changed! Pre-1979 Iran, under the Shah? Covering was illegal: like, ripped off bodies, arresting old grandmas, illegal. After 1979, under the new Islamic Republic? Not covering was illegal: like, infamous vice police involved, fines, corporal punishment, and/or imprisonment are sanctioned by law. Which means: people’s relationships to covering—as an act of resistance, as a show of piety, as a mandatory piece of fabric, as a place to play with what’s allowed, as a symbol—has shifted radically just in some people’s lifetimes.

        • In short? Hijab is interesting in part because non-Muslim, often white EuroAmericans are obsessed with it, which makes it a reflection on how we think about religion and gender almost more so than how Muslims do. Homework for more.

Pussy Riot takes over an Eastern Orthodox Church, 2012. Via NPR.

Pussy Riot takes over an Eastern Orthodox Church, 2012. Via NPR.

  • Sixth stop: RUSSIA — it’s a Pussy Riot church takeover.:

    • Pussy Riot stormed a cathedral in 2012, set up speakers, and loudly called on the Virgin Mary to become a feminist. They didn’t show up and tell everyone they were stupid for being in church or believing in god—they reclaimed the church as a space where women could be valued as equals. It is, as they say: PUNK ROCK.

  • Stops the seventh & eighth: ISRAEL / PALESTINE.

    • #7: PINKWASHING.

      • Pinkwashing refers to using LGBTQ+ issues as a front to cover up (y’know, wash over) other, less liberal, less accommodating issues. In the case of the state of Israel, pinkwashing refers to the ways in which Israel is portrayed/portrays itself as progressive, liberal, even “Western” because of its record of LGBTQ+ rights. This portrayal is in contrast to and--some would argue--as a cover up of the ways in which Palestinians, Arabs, and non-white/non-Jewish folks are treated by the state. So, pinkwashing serves as a way to “cover up” one’s racisms because, well, good liberals who love queers are good and liberal, right? It’s also a way to “prove” that Israel is better than its Arab and Muslim-majority neighbors: “good” states allow for freedom and recognition in sexuality and gender, “bad” ones do not.

    • #8: WOMEN OF THE WALL.

      • Jewish women have organized an ongoing campaign that dates to the 1980s to be allowed to pray, out loud, wear prayer shawls, and read from the Torah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, which is (arguably) Judaism’s holiest site.

      • We literally JUST SAID that pinkwashing helps us see Israel as progressive and lefty, and now we’re saying that that same Israel won’t let devout women pray at a holy site? Yes. Yes we are. Because gender is complicated and political.

        • Jewish women aren’t allowed to read from their holy texts at the holiest site because ultra-Orthodox Jewish men have made it illegal to do so.

        • Gender, here, is conflated and constrained by some people’s interpretation of the same texts as well as national politics (it’s illegal not just God’ll get ya not allowed). 

  • Stops we didn’t make because no one has all the time.

    • Not on today’s ticket, but future stops could include:

      • The Vatican (Roman Catholicism) and Eastern Europe, more or less (the Eastern Orthodox Church) to talk about how both won’t allow women into the priesthood.

      • The YMCA, to talk about how ideals of masculinity literally made the YMCA possible--because being fit in body means you’re fit in spirit, and other muscular ideas about texts and practices from the early 20th century.

      • Anywhere Buddhists are, but especially East and Southeast Asia, to chat about how Buddhist texts repeatedly talk about how any person can attain enlightenment but how most Buddhist orders separate men and women based on gender, and when push comes to shove, women have been in lesser positions than men. 

  • Pulling into the thesis station:

    • The point in bouncing us all over—sati, hijra, pinkwashing, Pussy Riot, hijab—all of this was to demonstrate how gender is mediated, performed, demonstrated within the bounds of religion, and how religion is mediated, performed, demonstrated with respect to gender. These are co-constitutive. Like we’ve been saying.

Primary Sources:

(because we, too, exist in the world we’re describing)

Ilyse talked about how age matters around issues of gender, and talked about how she has experienced different levels of access, different expectations of performing religion as she has moved from girl to unmarried women to married women to mom.

Megan also talked about the problems of this heterosexist, reproductive understanding of women’s lives with respect to paganism.

Story Time:

(citing our theoretical influences)

We drew from the late, great Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, which is an ethnography, a theory, a gem of a book focusing on the women’s mosque movement in Egypt.

The women’s mosque movement signaled the first time in Egyptian history that we saw widespread women-led involvement in mosques. But these women also advocated for conservative ideas. Mahmood was asking us to think about how women’s movements are labeled “liberatory” (or not) and thus understood as ‘freedom-loving” or not. These labels seriously undercut, Mahmood argued, the idea of agency. 

At the very start of Politics of Piety (2005), Mahmood writes:

“Women's participation in, and support for, the Islamist movement provokes strong responses from feminists across a broad range of the political spectrum. One of the most common reactions is the supposition that women Islamist supporters are pawns in a grand patriarchal plan, who, if freed from their bondage, would naturally express their instinctual abhorrence for the traditional Islamic mores used to enchain them. Even those analysts who are skeptical of the false-consciousness thesis underpinning this approach nonetheless continue to frame the issue in terms of a fundamental contradiction: why would such a large number of women across the Muslim world actively support a movement that seems inimical to their "own interests and agendas," especially at a historical moment when these women appear to have more emancipatory possibilities available to them? Despite important differences between these two reactions, both share the assumption that there is something intrinsic to women that should predispose them to oppose the practices, values, and injunctions that the Islamist movement embodies. Yet, one may ask, is such an assumption valid? What is the history by which we have come to assume its truth? What kind of a political imagination would lead one to think in this manner? More importantly, if we discard such an assumption, what other analytical tools might be available to ask a different set of questions about women's participation in the Islamist movement? (1-2)

Both Megan and Ilyse fawned over Mahmood because she does such important work: asking us to rethink whether “agency” means “resistance” and why that’s limiting really rewired both of their brains.

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.

Megan’s list this week:

Ilyse’s list of extra work:

We’ve pulled into the station! Mind the gap!