Orit Avishai

“Doing Religion” In a Secular World Women in Conservative Religions and the Question of Agency

Sociological studies of womens experiences with conservative religions are typically framed by a paradox that ponders womens complicity. The prevailing view associates agency with strategic subjects who use religion to further extra-religious ends and pays little attention to the cultural and institutional contexts that shape “compliance.” This paper suggests an alternative framing. Rather than asking why women comply, I examine agency as religious conduct and religiosity as a constructed status. Drawing on a study that examined how orthodox Jewish Israeli women observe, negotiate, and make sense of regulations of marital sexuality, this paper explains religious womens agency as religious conduct, or the “doing” of religion. I demonstrate that doing religion is associated with a search for authentic religious subjecthood and that religiosity is shaped in accordance with the logics of ones religion, and in the context of controlling messages about threatened symbolic boundaries and cultural Others.

A Gender Lens on Religion

This special issue is the result of concerns about the marginalized status of gender within the sociology of religion. The collection of exciting new research in this special issue advocates for the importance of a gender lens on questions of religion in order to highlight issues, practices, peoples, and theories that would otherwise not be central to the discipline. We encourage sociologists who study religion to engage more in interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship, acknowledge developments in the global South, and develop more compelling theoretical frameworks that analyze religion from a gendered perspective. Our aim is to bring religion to the attention of gender and feminist scholars and to encourage religion scholars to consider gender not just as a variable but as a social structure. We hope that both groups of scholars will consider gender and religion as mutually constitutive social categories.

The Feminist Ethnographer’s Dilemma Reconciling Progressive Research Agendas with Fieldwork Realities

In this article, we use three case studies of conservative field sites to consider the dilemma faced when feminist analytic perspectives clash with observations. We note that feminism can operate as a blinder, limiting our ability to see and interpret empirical realities that do not conform with feminist expectations. Using our research on orthodox Jewish women’s practices of menstrual purity, evangelical ex-gay ministries, and state-sponsored marriage promotion programs as examples, we discuss our shared experience that unreflexive feminist critiques of seemingly antifeminist social practices, groups, and policies can impede our ability to understand how feminism has influenced nonfeminist spaces. We use our cases to reflect upon a tension that informs all progressive social change research: the tension between our political sensibilities and goals and our intellectual mission to produce reliable knowledge. In responding to that tension, we argue that feminist researchers should incorporate institutional reflexivity on feminism itself as part of their ethnographic practice.

Marriage Goes to School

In recent years, policy efforts to alleviate poverty have focused on marriage and relationship education. Orit Avishai’s, Melanie Heath’s,and Jennifer Randles’s research finds that efforts to address poverty via relationship skills training are misguided because this approach does not address the structural causes of poverty.

Managing the Lactating Body: The Breastfeeding Project in the Age of Anxiety

Public health campaigns aimed at increasing breastfeeding rates in the United States rest on the twin premises that the ‘breast is best’ and that breastfeeding is ‘natural’. This chapter draws on interviews with class-privileged American mothers to demonstrate that far from ‘natural’, breastfeeding decisions, practices and experiences are shaped by historical, cultural, political and social norms and customs. The chapter examines how this group of women makes decisions about infant feeding and their breastfeeding practices. I demonstrate that these women construct the lactating body as a carefully managed site and breastfeeding as a mothering project – a task to be researched, planned, implemented and assessed, supported by expert knowledge, professional advice and consumption. Viewed in this light, ‘the breast is best’ and ‘breastfeeding is natural’ are impoverished slogans that do not capture the extent to which both the science and the imagery of breastfeeding are shaped by normative assumptions and middle-class experiences. The chapter also diverges from the emphases on pleasure, embodied subjectivity, relationality and empowerment that characterise much of the recent breastfeeding literature across the humanities, arguing that these normative/political agendas do not reflect empirical realities.

Bifurcated Conversations in Sociological Studies of Religion and Gender

Feminist sociologists claim that while feminist insights have been incorporated in sociological paradigms and women sociologists have been well-integrated into academia, sociological frameworks have not been transformed, a process known as the missing feminist revolution. Yet, few have examined how the missing feminist revolution operates in specific subdisciplines and the mechanisms that sustain it. This article undertakes these tasks by analyzing religion and gender scholarship published in six sociology journals over the past 32 years. We find evidence of partial integration and continued marginalization. However, we also document disparate networks of interlocutors that operate in two distinct intellectual fields—religion and gender. We argue that this bifurcation partially explains the missing feminist revolution and that insularity of feminist conversations likely contributes to this process. Our findings shed light on obstacles to transforming mainstream disciplines.

Women of God

Is God bad for women? Media consumers in North America and Europe are probably familiar with this narrative: conservative and fundamentalist religions—those that take religion seriously and politicize religiosity—are on the rise, and thats bad for women. In France, wearing a the headscarf in public spaces is decried as an affront to French notions of citizenship and to womens personhood. In the United States, Afghan womens plight at the hands of the Taliban was used as a justification for American intervention. Since the emancipation of women and the diversification of family forms and sexualities are among the hallmarks of modernity and secularization, and since fundamentalist religious groups tend to hold traditional views on gender, sexuality, and the family, conservative religions are typically viewed as antithetical to womens interests (not to mention modern, democratic ideals of choice and the freedom to chart ones own destiny).

Toward a Feminist Ethnography of Feminist Ethnography: A Response

In “The Feminist Ethnographer’s Dilemma: Reconciling Progressive Research Agendas with Fieldwork Realities,” we reflected on methodological tensions we each experienced when our feminist theoretical frameworks did not adequately explain what we observed and heard in the field.1 Our fieldwork consisted of multiyear ethnographic studies of three conservative, seemingly nonfeminist social spaces: orthodox Jewish women’s practices of menstrual purity, evangelical ex-gay ministries, and a state-sponsored marriage education program. In identifying this shared tension, we argued that feminism2 can operate as a blinder when our feminist political commitments to progressive social change—particularly the eradication of gender inequality—constrain our ability to analyze our data adequately and accurately. To address this tension, we advocated for institutional reflexivity, a supraindividual reflexive practice focused on interrogating the political and intellectual commitments learned through feminist ethnographic training that inform our fieldwork and analysis. Since we began writing about the feminist ethnographer’s dilemma in 2009, we have had the privilege of sharing our work in a variety of academic

God’s Case for Sex:

This article complicates a popular notion that conservative religions are incompatible with sexual expression and pleasure. Case studies from Orthodox Judaism and evangelical Protestant Christianity demonstrate a breadth of sexual expressions and negotiations of desire and sin that defy the association of conservative religions with sexual repression.

Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine

take religion in school every year, most schools only offer classes in the Protestant or Catholic religions. Finally, Bucerius stresses the importance of citizenship acquisition for ‘‘second-generation immigrants born in Germany before 2000’’ (p. 187), the group currently excluded by law. Bucerius implicitly argues that whether or not they have a criminal record, second-generation immigrants belong to Germany; and state policy is in part responsible for their current situation. On a broader level, Bucerius underscores ‘‘the absence of room for marginalized people in the formal system’’ (p. 189) and the importance of police officers’ cultural awareness of the norms of minority communities (illustrated in an example of officers failing to remove their shoes in a Muslim household). This book and the research on which it is based are both convincing and useful in clarifying the pain, resilience, and agency of second-generation Muslim minorities seeking to make a life for themselves in Germany, the country in which most of them were born. Bucerius got to know these men, slowly and carefully. They shared with her their experiences of being sidelined academically in school and their difficulties in joining the formal economy. She recognizes the impact of structural barriers in their complaints. She reports on their determination to make a good, ‘‘pure’’ (p. 125) life for themselves when they finish drug dealing, a plan that they feel they can accomplish if they don’t get ‘‘carried away’’ (p. 77). Even as she chronicles their ambitions, rationalizations, and activities, Bucerius recognizes that the energy, innovation, and optimism of these second-generation immigrant young men caught up in the drug trade are no match for the limitations on their life chances imposed from the outside and by their own criminal activities. They often make poor decisions because they don’t believe that the legitimate system will work for them. Most members of the second-generation Muslim immigrant population in Germany do not involve themselves in criminal activity. But like the group of men studied by Bucerius, their access to many legitimate opportunities in Germany is blocked by exclusionary state policy and discriminatory attitudes. As a result, the state does not benefit fully from the talents of those of immigrant background, and the pain experienced by Bucerius’s study group is widely shared by many who do not violate the law.