Reflections on the Promise and Challenge of Interdisciplinary Research on Gender and Religion

Abstract

In 2011, Religion & Gender emerged as a new journal poised to create a space for the increasing feminist interest in studies of religious life (Avishai and Irby 2017; Korte 2011). At this time, I was a doctoral student in Sociology on the precipice of my own intellectual journey in this scholarly area. While I had entered graduate school with an interest in gender and religion, a significant turning point in my professional trajectory also occurred in 2011 when I was partnered with Orit Avishai to organize a session at the 2012 American Sociological Association’s annual meeting on “Religion, Gender, and Sexuality.” At that time, the experience of reviewing papers and reading in the broader subfield to prepare discussant commentsmarked the beginning of a joint research project into thehistory of sociological scholarshipongender and religion, some of which I discuss below. Nearly a decade later, however, I was asked again to help organize a session of the same title at the same meeting which provides an illustrative comparison of changes in our field. On the ten-year anniversary of Religion &Gender, I take this opportunity to reflect on the promise and challenge of creating systemic research that speaks across disciplinary boundaries. As I look toward the horizon of the next decade of gender and religion scholarship, it’s important to step back and consider the intellectual history that brought us to the moment of the journal’s debut. For social scientists, including sociologists like myself, the subfield of gender and religion developed in earnest in the 1980s “when researchers turned to study women’s actual experiences with religion” (Avishai 2010:48). Previous studies of religion tended to ignore women’s experiences by assuming an androcentric bias, and the few studies on women and religion conducted at that time mostly focused on how it operated as a constraint and inhibited the potential of gender equality.While much of the research that emerged was explicitly feminist, the researchers felt that “religion was not high on the priority lists of issues to be examined by