JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION最新文献

{"title":"Editors' Introduction","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.01","url":null,"abstract":"Editors' Introduction Michal Raucher and Kate Ott This issue of the journal highlights the comparative nature of the field of feminist studies in religion. In addition to articles and poetry, readers will find three conversations among scholars. Together they approach an issue from their distinct perspectives. Authors learn with and from one another as they think anew about their own interests. It is some of the best kind of work in the academy, where a group of scholars approaches intransigent issues together, in the hope that they can use different lenses to provide new answers to old questions. We hope the rich conversations in this issue will generate new ideas, questions, and answers for you as well. Each year, we honor submissions from scholars who are less than four years postgraduation with the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award (NSA). This year's winner of the NSA is Magda Mohamed. \"Queer Muslim Piety\" explores queer Muslim women's attitudes toward their hijab. Mohamed's important ethnographic research with queer Muslims disaggregates the hijab and female modesty from heteronormative sexual attraction. Other articles submitted for this award include Emma McDonald's \"Finding the Maternal Divine in the Contextual Realities of Motherhood\" and Eliana Ah-Rum Ku's \"Challenging Texts with Violence toward Women.\" McDonald argues for a new exploration of maternal metaphors for God in Catholic and Protestant theology. These new metaphors, McDonald demonstrates, can be drawn from more diverse experiences of motherhood than those that have historically been incorporated into divine imagery. Eliana Ah-Rum Ku's article also attends to the voices of those not often heard. Ku reads challenging texts through a postcolonial feminist framework and argues that this approach allows readers to witness suffering and lament alongside injustice. Following the new scholar essays, this issue features two conversations among scholars. These formats reflect our feminist commitment to engage in challenging conversations and promote a multiplicity of opinions. Additionally, the [End Page 1] conversations in these pages are continuations of dialogues started many years ago. Readers will enjoy seeing how the discourse has shifted and grown. In the first roundtable, twelve feminist scholars of the Qurʾan discuss influential methodologies and promising new directions in gender-attuned research in qurʾanic studies. These scholars are expanding a conversation from seven years prior in JFSR 32.2, when scholars published a roundtable on feminist discourse in Islamic studies. This group of twelve scholars collaborated on a roundtable at the International Qurʾanic Studies Association (IQSA) 2022 conference in Palermo, Italy, and subsequently published their conversation in our pages. This roundtable reflects the many ways the feminist study of the Qurʾan has expanded to include extra-qurʾanic corpora, critique of masculinity, and spirituality, among others. Poetry ","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Critical Studies of Hadith and of Islamic Masculinity: Two Important Frontiers for Future Qur'anic Scholarship","authors":"Yasmin Amin","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.10","url":null,"abstract":"Critical Studies of Hadith and of Islamic MasculinityTwo Important Frontiers for Future Qur'anic Scholarship Yasmin Amin (bio) This roundtable offers frameworks for critical reading, methods for challenging subjectivity and methodological rigidity, strategies for engaging with qurʾanic interpretive traditions, and avenues for conducting rigorous philological, grammatical, rhetorical, and structural analyses. But at least two additional critical and interrelated issues remain to be explored. First, the majority of feminist works separate qurʾanic narratives about women and men and focus on verses that deal with social issues pertaining predominantly to women (most notably Q 2:282, 4:1, 4:34, and 24:31); however, this approach preserves much of the logic on which patriarchy is built. Future feminist scholarship should devote more energy to understanding the construction of masculinity in the Qurʾan and in extra-qurʾanic sources. Second, many studies focus solely on the Qurʾan and its exegesis by employing works from the inherited canon to deconstruct, undermine, or expose inherent gender biases. However, the inherited canon, especially in the traditionally grounded episteme of qurʾanic sciences, consists of interconnected scholarly disciplines. Authors writing in the tafsīr genre use hadith (aḥādīth) to interpret the Qurʾan, but in doing so, they often disregard the painstaking classification system developed over the centuries to discern the authenticity of hadith reports. Future feminist qurʾanic scholarship should critique the misuse of hadith, particularly in instances where the misuse entrenches male privilege and undermines other instances in the Qurʾan which depict an egalitarian ethos in marriage and gender relations more broadly.1 [End Page 75] Over centuries and generations, male scholars have advanced male legislative and scholarly privileges while female interpretive authorities have been marginalized.2 Therefore, to generate more gender-based research that positively affects women's lived realities, the narrow focus on Qurʾan and tafsīr should be widened to reconstruct a more egalitarian, inclusive, and gender-just ethos for qurʾanic scholarship. Given that the Qurʾan constitutes the foundation of Islamic epistemology and given that scholars interpret it through the prophetic Sunna (the reported actions and behaviors of the Prophet Muḥammad), through qiyās (deductive analogy), and through ijmāʿ (consensus), a reexamination of the whole interpretive foundation is paramount. In particular, the abuse of aḥādīth and prophetic sīra (biographical narrations) when used to entrench prevailing gendered hierarchies and bolster discriminatory laws constitutes a complete disregard for the model prophetic legacy. Current and future generations deserve the right to interpret the Qurʾan and thereby also change the laws in the context of their changing lived realities and circumstances, thus restoring the dynamic relationship between reason and consen","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Qurʾanic Textuality and the Potential of Aesthetic ( Jamālī ) Interpretation","authors":"Omaima Abou-Bakr","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.13","url":null,"abstract":"Qurʾanic Textuality and the Potential of Aesthetic (Jamālī) Interpretation Omaima Abou-Bakr (bio) At the other end of the spectrum from the extra-qurʾanic material and women's lived reality is qurʾanic textuality. Much in alignment with Hadia Mubarak's approach to studying the Qurʾan on its own terms, internal logic, and moral world, and with Amira Abou Taleb's overarching paradigm of iḥsān, as described in this roundtable and in her writing more broadly, I put forth a particular hermeneutical \"textual\" method that draws upon the approaches and interpretive tools of literary criticism and aesthetic theory. Applications on the qurʾanic text would mean analyzing features of textual beauty and harmony—especially in the form of elements of unity, coherence, symmetry, sequence, structural patterns, repetitions, echoes, correspondences, binaries, and counterparts—as a gateway to uncovering deeper ethical and spiritual meanings. The beautiful textual form embodies, illustrates, and conveys an ethical message, and a reader experiences an apprehension of \"harmony-in-the-text\" as a means and guide to the inner layers of thought. In other words, the process seeks a synthesis of aesthetic sense, emotive response, and reflection (tadabbur)—with a focus on gender ethics. This method of examining language, rhetorical devices, structure, and style has both classical and modern roots. Classical concepts like iʾjāz (the Qurʾan's inimitability), such as in Kitāb Ḍalāʾil al-Iʾjāz (Proofs of Inimitability) and Asrār al-Balagha fī ʿIlm al-Bayān (Secrets of Rhetoric in the Science of Eloquence) by ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī' (d. 471 H/1078 CE), Nazm al-Qurʾān (Structural Organization of the Qurʾan) by al-Jāḥiẓ (160–256 H/776–869 CE), and Sufi symbolic interpretation (al-tafsīr al-ishārī), dealt with diverse textual facets, though rarely leading to holistic considerations, such as making clear links with ethical meanings and gender justice. Modern developments and special interest in coherence-focused exegesis begin with Hamīdudīn Farāhī (1836–1930) and Amīn Iṣlāḥī (1904–97), and contemporary scholarship's revivification of this trend includes the literary school of Amīn al-Khulī (1895–1966) and Āʾisha Abd [End Page 87] al-Raḥmān (1913–98) in Egypt, initiating her work of exegesis that focuses on stylistic features of eloquence and psychological effect entitled al-Tafsīr al-Bayānī lil-Qurʾān al-Karīm (1962). More scholarship centering coherence and unity followed, including the studies of Mustansir Mir (b. 1949) on the \"sura as a unity,\" al-Waḥda al-Bināʾiyya li-l-Qurʾān al-Majīd (Structural Unity of the Glorious Qurʾan, 2006), by Taha Jabir Alalwani (1935–2016), and Salwa El-Awa's Textual Relations in the Qurʾan (2006). Currently, this scholarly movement of holistic approaches in qurʾanic studies is led and applied by Nevin Reda.1 Building on this tradition, I seek more applications of this kind of hermeneutics through what is termed in literary theory as \"close reading\"","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Muslim Feminist Exegetes, Not \"Handmaidens of Empire\"","authors":"Mahjabeen Dhala","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.12","url":null,"abstract":"Muslim Feminist Exegetes, Not \"Handmaidens of Empire\" Mahjabeen Dhala (bio) In her essay \"Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of Terror,\" the late anthropologist Saba Mahmood used the term \"handmaiden of empire\" to express her wariness of how the Euro-American tropes of freedom and gender equality were directed at Muslim women.1 Her critique inspires my own interrogation of the autonomy of contemporary Muslim feminist qurʾanic discourses. We must ask ourselves: Has feminist Qurʾan scholarship become a \"handmaiden of empire\" in the context of the Islamophobic and secular underpinnings of Western academia? Have we already become unwitting bedfellows with the \"caesars and sultans\" of academia that Celene Ibrahim describes? Indeed, unabating Islamophobic rhetoric misconstrues Muslim women's embodiments of religious identity as signs of religious subjugation and has kept Muslim feminist scholarship mired in a prescriptive paradigm charted by white feminist thought. Concurrently, the secularist strategy of promoting liberal and progressive scholarship has deterred feminist approaches that argue for the empowerment of Muslim women from within the tradition. In opposition to such trends, my research centers premodern Muslim women as theologians, exegetes, and activists, and from this vantage point, I develop constructive methodologies for feminist readings of the Qurʾan, including those that consider Muslim exegesis and extra-qurʾanic literature, as advocated for in this roundtable by Hadia Mubarak and Rahel Fischbach, respectively. Moreover, secular scholars often dismiss constructive methodologies as not being \"critical\" enough based on a secularist understanding of the purpose of \"critique\" that stems from their own historical contentions within Christian-dominated [End Page 83] institutions that have claimed a monopoly on authenticating knowledge. From a Muslim epistemic standpoint, critique has functioned more as a significant feature inherent to traditional systems of Islamic knowledge production. Muslims subscribe to the monotheistic notion of God and the Qurʾan as the word of God on the tongue of God's Prophet; however, in traditional scholarship, Muslims debate details pertaining to God's precise attributes and debate how the Qurʾan should be read, interpreted, and applied to Muslim life, among other themes. In this intellectual tradition, difference of opinion is often regarded by scholars as both natural and essential. Hence, I ask: Should European Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment notions of critical scholarship be prescriptively applied to nonwhite, non-Christian, indigenous scholarship as well? Furthermore, must qurʾanic studies in Western academia, including feminist readings of the Qurʾan, comply with secularized modalities of knowledge production to be considered sufficiently \"critical\"? Put plainly, how autonomous is feminist Qurʾan scholarship in the secular academy? Where are the female indigenous voices, those voice","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Negotiating Gender and Religion: Comparative Perspectives from Judaism and Islam","authors":"Lisa Anteby-Yemini","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.28","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Women in Orthodox Judaism and mainstream Islam are discriminated against in Muslim and Jewish family law; subjected to rulings elaborated by men regarding female purity and reproductive rights; segregated in the spaces of synagogues and mosques; and excluded from advanced study, interpretation of religious law ( fiqh and halakha ), and spiritual leadership. Gender-nonconforming believers have no place, either. Nonetheless, since the mid-twentieth century, Jewish and Muslim women as well as sexual minorities have been making claims for gender justice, attempting to change from within these conservative religions. The article shows convergences and divergences in women's strategies to undermine male hegemony on religious authority in both faiths. If numerous works have dealt with female agency and resistance to patriarchy in each tradition, comparative studies are still lacking, and this article suggests areas in family law, ritual purity, and procreation to further feminist and queer interreligious research.","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Yeshua Sits Cross-Legged with His Classmates and Listens to Artemis's Parable of the Soccer Match, and: Memorial to the Canaanite Woman","authors":"Benjamin Bagocius","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908308","url":null,"abstract":"Yeshua Sits Cross-Legged with His Classmates and Listens to Artemis's Parable of the Soccer Match, and: Memorial to the Canaanite Woman Benjamin Bagocius (bio) YESHUA SITS CROSS-LEGGED WITH HIS CLASSMATES AND LISTENS TO ARTEMIS'S PARABLE OF THE SOCCER MATCH At the soccer matchplayers kick the ball out of boundsinto the stands The ball floats at youIt is big and soft. There is no wayyou will not catch it No one else in the stands moves to clutch itThey relax That it is meant for youis obvious Just sit there Who you are does not riseand clamor for foul ballsthat fly into the throng The game is where you sit and watch God's big, rounded softnesswaft into your lap [End Page 103] MEMORIAL TO THE CANAANITE WOMAN A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to Jesus, crying out, \"Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon-possession.\" —Matthew 15:22 (NIV) In the city, obelisksreaching toward heaven celebrate thenation's founder. A domed cathedralpraises the manwhose acts of diplomacyin warwe rehearse on the designatedholiday. A building with seven columnsat the end of a gardenresembling a football fieldprotects the ideas of hewho championed the right sideof brotherhood. There are no plaques for the Canaanite Woman. Few know they passher house on a street off the thruwayto the obelisk, the cathedral,the garden of columns. Was it a brick home? This street?The thruway takes us past. Every time you lovebeyond love's barbed wirefence and no one knows, not even you yetin your unspeakable strain,you visit the invisible structure. You honor her. [End Page 104] [End Page 105] Benjamin Bagocius Benjamin Bagocius, PhD, writes and teaches across literature, queer thought, and spirituality. An associate professor of the humanities with Bard Early Colleges, Ben's first book of poetry, The Canaanite Woman, was released in Summer 2022, and his second book of poetry, \"The Gospel According to B.,\" is slated for publication in 2024. Ben's writing appears in a range of venues, including On Being, The Other Journal, Modernism/modernity, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. Ben is founding director of the Institute for Spiritual Poetry, which hosts writing workshops and other events and publishes a journal. Reach out and learn more at BenjaminBagocius.com and InstituteForSpiritualPoetry.com. Copyright © 2023 The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc.","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Nurturing Gender Justice: Qurʾanic Interpretation and Muslim Feminist Thought","authors":"Roshan Iqbal","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908296","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908296","url":null,"abstract":"Nurturing Gender JusticeQurʾanic Interpretation and Muslim Feminist Thought Roshan Iqbal (bio) Here I attempt to categorize Muslim feminists' methodological interventions that are aimed at advancing gender equality from within the tradition.1 I highlight four notable areas of intervention that have significantly contributed to this ongoing pursuit: intertextuality, intratextuality, fiqh (jurisprudence), and Sufi and philosophical texts. Intratextuality, as Amira Abou-Taleb, Omaima Abou-Bakr, Abla Hasan, and others describe it here, is the practice of comparing interconnected qurʾanic verses and terms, rather than interpreting them atomistically. It involves considering verses within the broader context of the Qurʾan's emphasis on promoting justice and equality for all humanity. Amira Abou-Taleb argues that iḥsān is at the core of the Qurʾan's moral worldview, emphasizing that justice is a crucial prerequisite for iḥsān. Gender justice, when viewed through the lens of iḥsān, becomes not only a fundamental societal objective but also an essential means to uphold the Qurʾan's moral framework. Similarly, Abla Hasan provides a contextual reappraisal of Q 4:34 using an intratextual approach. In her broader work, Celene Ibrahim looks at sexuality in the Qurʾan through a comprehensive analysis of narratives involving female figures.2 Another example is Hadia Mubarak's analysis of [End Page 59] male and female nushūz (rebellion) in Q 4:34 and Q 4:128.3 These scholars, and others, provide us with an invaluable female-centric lens through which to understand the Qurʾan's intratextuality.4 The second feminist methodological intervention is intertextuality. Intertextuality invites a reappraisal of qurʾanic meanings considering aḥādīth (oral narrations, Eng. hadith), sunna (the reported actions and behaviors of the Prophet Muḥammad), and asbāb al.nuzūl (the reported contexts for the revelation of specific qurʾanic verses). Fatema Mernissi is generally considered the first contemporary Muslim feminist to investigate the authenticity and authority of aḥādīth attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad about the issue of woman's leadership.5 Saʾdiyya Shaikh also studies the construction of gender in aḥādīth discussing women's knowledge and sexuality.6 Other attempts include Rawand Osman's study of female figures in Shiʿi aḥādīth, exegesis, and biographical literature.7 In this roundtable and elsewhere, Yasmin Amin examines the misapplication of hadith, specifically when it reinforces male privilege and undermines the Qurʾan's portrayal of egalitarian principles in marriage and gender relations. Rahel Fischbach also discusses the challenges and potential of using additional exegetical and narrative literature, alongside the Qurʾan, to foster gender-just interpretations. The third methodological intervention by Muslim feminists considers issues of fiqh. An example of this can be found in the insights of Hina Azam, who finds Islamic law to have two competing and sometimes ov","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"See Me, Hear Me, Recognize Me","authors":"Rachel A. R. Bundang","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.24","url":null,"abstract":"See Me, Hear Me, Recognize Me Rachel A. R. Bundang (bio) On the way to preparing these reflections,1 I stopped to watch the documentary short 38 at the Garden, in which Jeremy Lin finally gives himself permission to revisit the winter of 2012, when Linsanity hit the New York Knicks and the NBA.2 Much of the film shows the racism he encountered throughout his pursuit of a professional basketball career, in his improbable rise and fall. Through interviews with journalists, comedians, cultural commentators, and former teammates, we remember and understand anew the multilayered importance of representation and the way Lin shattered expectations. What I found most thoughtful, though, was the way Lin presented his unique, Cinderella experience as bookended with the Trump-fueled anti-Asian racism of these last few years. The documentary pointed me right to the predicament of Asian invisibility, which means that we are hiding in plain sight—until we are not. Asian invisibility in the United States is made to feel and seem natural, so that the moments and patterns of racism go unquestioned. The anti-Asian racism that flared up under Trump has not gone away; at best, it has leveled off a little. I have been living and working in coastal cities most of my life, and it surprised me that even in the Bay Area, with its high Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander (AAPI) population, I was attacked, harassed, made to feel unsafe and unwelcome. By making his bigotry clear, undeniable, and unapologetic, Trump gave permission through his example. Shifting Trump's familiar, othering tropes of contagion, infestation, and disease, I posit that he contaminated the social climate so that attacks in public spaces and public discourse became more common, normalized, and even \"excused.\" In my case, I also saw [End Page 133] this bigotry seep into the workplace/classroom climate, when at a former institution a white male student freely hurled racist insults at me and suffered little consequence other than being transferred out of my class. AAPI individuals and communities are often rendered strange, and othered, as in the original sense of \"alien\"; it is so embedded that racists do not always recognize how or that they are being racist. We generally \"wear our foreignness on our face,\" so while we might have occasional, situational power or privilege, it is capped or porous. Unless we happen to be visibly white-passing (or some other form of passing more readily slotted and intelligible), we will never be perceived as American, if that means trying to locate ourselves in that strict racial binary. And that is also part of the invisibility. In the US context, the racial binary still hangs heavy and admits nothing but \"Black and white.\" The continuum is not real, and it does not work. Additionally, AAPI communities contend with the messiness and uncertainty of who actually counts as Asian, and when, and why, and how; I cannot think of the equivalent of a one-drop rule for u","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editors' Introduction","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/jfs.2023.a908291","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfs.2023.a908291","url":null,"abstract":"Editors' Introduction Michal Raucher and Kate Ott This issue of the journal highlights the comparative nature of the field of feminist studies in religion. In addition to articles and poetry, readers will find three conversations among scholars. Together they approach an issue from their distinct perspectives. Authors learn with and from one another as they think anew about their own interests. It is some of the best kind of work in the academy, where a group of scholars approaches intransigent issues together, in the hope that they can use different lenses to provide new answers to old questions. We hope the rich conversations in this issue will generate new ideas, questions, and answers for you as well. Each year, we honor submissions from scholars who are less than four years postgraduation with the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholars Award (NSA). This year's winner of the NSA is Magda Mohamed. \"Queer Muslim Piety\" explores queer Muslim women's attitudes toward their hijab. Mohamed's important ethnographic research with queer Muslims disaggregates the hijab and female modesty from heteronormative sexual attraction. Other articles submitted for this award include Emma McDonald's \"Finding the Maternal Divine in the Contextual Realities of Motherhood\" and Eliana Ah-Rum Ku's \"Challenging Texts with Violence toward Women.\" McDonald argues for a new exploration of maternal metaphors for God in Catholic and Protestant theology. These new metaphors, McDonald demonstrates, can be drawn from more diverse experiences of motherhood than those that have historically been incorporated into divine imagery. Eliana Ah-Rum Ku's article also attends to the voices of those not often heard. Ku reads challenging texts through a postcolonial feminist framework and argues that this approach allows readers to witness suffering and lament alongside injustice. Following the new scholar essays, this issue features two conversations among scholars. These formats reflect our feminist commitment to engage in challenging conversations and promote a multiplicity of opinions. Additionally, the [End Page 1] conversations in these pages are continuations of dialogues started many years ago. Readers will enjoy seeing how the discourse has shifted and grown. In the first roundtable, twelve feminist scholars of the Qurʾan discuss influential methodologies and promising new directions in gender-attuned research in qurʾanic studies. These scholars are expanding a conversation from seven years prior in JFSR 32.2, when scholars published a roundtable on feminist discourse in Islamic studies. This group of twelve scholars collaborated on a roundtable at the International Qurʾanic Studies Association (IQSA) 2022 conference in Palermo, Italy, and subsequently published their conversation in our pages. This roundtable reflects the many ways the feminist study of the Qurʾan has expanded to include extra-qurʾanic corpora, critique of masculinity, and spirituality, among others. Poetry ","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135639238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Decolonizing the Body, Pedagogies, and Anti-Asian Hate","authors":"Najeeba Syeed","doi":"10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.22","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/jfemistudreli.39.2.22","url":null,"abstract":"Decolonizing the Body, Pedagogies, and Anti-Asian Hate Najeeba Syeed (bio) A student emails me, telling me she is in tears, grappling with what it means to let go of definitions of her identity that had held her hostage to the claims of colonized religion. She asks, \"What is left?\" I've had many students send me these types of emails. They struggle with the process of coming into their own agency and defining their heritage, articulating their experiences of marginalization, and also speaking openly about their strengths and dreams. Here are four pedagogical approaches I've adopted as a professor to respond to student needs and experiences like those named above: 1. Sequence the syllabus in ways that center decolonial framing before teaching religion itself. For example, I assign Linda Tuhiwai Smith's book Decolonizing Methodologies before other texts, before teaching texts on religion and spirituality.1 This framing allowed for colonial constructs we studied later to be interrogated and examined as students were learning them. It changed the method of ending a course with critique and centered the course in this constant questioning of how religions are studied and how religion is constructed in the overall academic framework and institutional settings. 2. Teach more women. I cannot emphasize this enough. So often decolonial critique is taught only from the perspectives of authors who identify as men; adding the voices of female-identified authors may mean stretching the boundaries of what is decolonial. I've used traditional religious writers who do not name [End Page 123] the decolonial method but execute it nonetheless. They may be writing in forms that are not readily accessible as academic texts. For my Indigenous students, for instance, this meant reading firsthand narratives that were not always scholarly works, but the embodied experience of decolonizing was evident, a roadmap in the text. 3. Pay attention to what I am modeling as professor. My body is the first text in the classroom interreligious encounter that a student reads. This is especially the case when students have not encountered religious diversity in their prior experiences. Especially as a woman—a Muslim woman, a Brown woman, and an Asian woman—it is important to name when encounters are complex, complicated, or problematic. This has been very hard. So often my age, my qualifications are asked about, personal revelations sought. Familiarity and comfort with me pursued, I had to insist on being \"Professor Syeed\" while my colleagues could be addressed by their first names with impunity. More deeply, I have begun to talk about and name when my own body was experiencing violations by what we read, by what we watched, and by what was said in the moment of interaction in the classroom. This has taken practice and deliberation over time. It is done with strength and honesty and clarity; and the methods of how I handled these conflicts were greatly appreciated by my students. 4. T","PeriodicalId":44347,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF FEMINIST STUDIES IN RELIGION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135691395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}