Rachel Rinaldo

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.

Mobilizing piety : Islam and feminism in Indonesia

Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Islam and Feminism in Jakarta Chapter 2: Islam, Women, and the Public Sphere in Indonesia Chapter 3: Fatayat and Rahima: Islamic Reformists Chapter 4: The Prosperous Justice Party: Islamizing Indonesia Chapter 5: Solidaritas Perempuan: Global Feminism in an Age of Islamic Revival Chapter 6: Conclusion Appendix A: Methodology Appendix B: Development Indicators References Index

Envisioning the Nation: Women Activists, Religion and the Public Sphere in Indonesia

Indonesias Islamic revival has coincided with the growing involvement of women in civil society. Muslim womens organizations are playing an important role in how the Indonesian nation-state is being re-imagined for the 21st century. Muslim womens groups are incubators for womens diverse political activism. The increasing role of Islam in the public sphere provides religious women with an important platform, facilitating their involvement in national debates over issues such as Shariah law, abortion and pornography. Such public sphere debates enfold significant struggles over the relationship between religion and the state. Through their involvement in these debates, Muslim women activists should be seen as participants in the renegotiation of the Indonesian nation-state.

Pious and Critical Muslim Women Activists and the Question of Agency

Recent turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa has prompted renewed concerns about women’s rights in Muslim societies. It has also raised questions about women’s agency and activism in religious contexts. This article draws on ethnographic research with women activists in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, to address such concerns. My fieldwork shows that some Muslim women activists in democratizing Indonesia manifest pious critical agency. Pious critical agency is the capacity to engage critically and publicly with religious texts. While some scholars have argued that pious and feminist subjectivity are inherently at odds, the emergence of pious critical agency in Indonesia demonstrates that piety and feminism can intersect in surprising and unexpected ways. Moreover, it shows that women’s agency can draw on both secular and religious resources and that religion can be used to promote critical discourses on gender.

Jakarta: Drawing the City NearJakarta: Drawing the City Near, by SimoneAbdouMaliq. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. 319 pp.

giously unaffiliated ‘‘nones,’’ Hispanic immigrants shore up Catholics, and Asian immigrants boost ‘‘other’’ religious traditions. Proportionately fewer individuals now identify with religious groups, not because they ‘‘believe but don’t belong,’’ but because ‘‘fewer Americans believe in the central tenets of the Christian tradition’’ (p. 113). Growing ‘‘sectarianization’’ of Protestantism, religious non-identification, and nonChristian religion are central trends Sherkat sees shaping the future of religion in America and influencing family life, social stratification, and politics in problematic ways. While conservative pundits defend heterosexual marriage in the name of moral virtue and social order, ‘‘conservative Christians continue to engage in premarital sex (often without contraception), marry early (often as a ‘solution’ to unplanned pregnancy), and then find themselves adrift with minimal education, dead-end jobs, and low incomes.’’ The patriarchal gender roles and authoritarian parenting of ‘‘religious exclusivism’’ stifle autonomy and hamper success in school and work in postindustrial America (pp. 143–44). Our current state of political polarization seems inevitable, Sherkat judges, given shifts in religious identification from the midtwentieth century dominated by a ‘‘relatively universalistic moderate and liberal Protestantism, along with a large contingent of sectarian groups and a diverse ethnic Catholic Church which condoned and supported Anglo-assimilation’’ (p. 172). Today, nonChristian and non-identified Americans slightly outnumber Baptists and sectarian Protestants, with each group claiming a quarter of U.S. citizens. They inhabit a more densely crowded, formally organized, and fiercely contested public square, Tocqueville might note, commingling more politicized churches and parachurch advocacy groups with more religiously charged parties and paraparty political-action groups to blur the lines of church-state separation. Tomorrow, the United States will be a ‘‘majority minority’’ society, the Census Bureau predicts, with non-Hispanic whites composing only 43 percent of the population by 2060 instead of their 63 percent in 2012. Questions remain, Sherkat concludes, about how this burgeoning diversity will shift future religious beliefs, practices, and identifications in relation to American family life, socioeconomic positioning, and political alignments. Tocqueville would recognize such questions, and deepen them. The strengths of this book spring from its careful analysis of GSS data to check the careless sweep of grand theories of secularization and supply-side competition in the religious marketplace. Its limitations stem from focusing in on this data on individual religious identification without a wider view of quantitative evidence marshaled within a stronger institutional framework (like that found, for example, in Claude Fischer and Michael Hout, A Century of Difference) and without a thicker cultural conception of religion like that found beyond the bounds of a functionalist psychology of religion providing individuals with supernatural compensators. Like the related formulation by Robert Putnam and David Campbell of recent ‘‘religious realignment, intensification, and diversification’’ in American Grace, the genuine value of this book lies in the survey data it analyzes—and the challenge it poses to scholars of religion and society across disciplines to deepen the cultural interpretation of religious change in fuller historical perspective.

27.00 paper. ISBN: 9780816693368.

Spurred by global events over the past two decades, American sociology has finally begun to take more serious account of Islam and Muslim societies. During this period of time, an important and interdisciplinary body of scholarship on gender and sexuality among Muslims has taken shape. While sociologists are among the contributors to this literature, it has yet to have much impact on the mainstream of sociology. This carefully edited volume aims to further develop the scholarship on gender and sexuality in Muslim societies, connecting changes in sex and gender regimes to both global and national dynamics. Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures, edited by Gul Ozyegin, is especially interesting for its emphasis on shifts in masculinities, as well as analyses of recent controversies such as female genital cutting and Islamic feminism. Another of its goals is to challenge the religious and gender essentialism that is rife in public discussions of the Muslim world. It would therefore make an excellent addition to Sociology of Sex and Gender classes that seek to be more global. The volume features contributions from scholars representing an array of disciplines and presents material based on studies from Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Syria, and Iran. Turkey is the subject of six of the 19 articles, and several of these provide case studies that will be of interest to sociologists. Salih Can Ac xiksöz shows how Turkish assisted reproduction programs that target disabled military veterans are part of a state-sponsored agenda to remasculinize such men, encouraging them to build families so that they conform to the dominant understanding of heterosexual masculinity and also working to construct a national community based on conservative and pronatalist ideals. Ac xiksöz’s article nicely demonstrates the relevance of national and religious agendas to artificial reproduction. Fatma Umut Bes xpinar examines the rise of new fatherhood ideals among middle-class men in urban Turkey. Though her sample is very small (15), her interviews reveal the influence of new global ideals of fatherhood—these men seek a more egalitarian marriage, reject traditional religious values, try to be involved with the upbringing of their children by playing with them and educating themselves in the latest techniques of parenting, and aim to raise children who are well-rounded ‘‘global citizens.’’ For sociologists familiar with the work of Annette Lareau and Sharon Hays, it is fascinating to see how far middle-class practices of ‘‘concerted cultivation’’ have spread. And yet, as in the West, these changes don’t always pose a challenge to conventional masculinity, as most of these men are secondary parents, remaining breadwinners while their wives take on the majority of parental responsibilities. This is apparently because few middleclass Turks challenge the conventional belief that mothers should be caregivers, and the focus on education in this social class means that families do not trust outside caretakers to be sufficiently educated. Thus, in a dynamic that also seems to be global, middle-class women’s careers are sacrificed in order to produce highly cultivated children. I hope that Bes xpinar will further develop this study, as it has much relevance for understanding global shifts in work, gender, and family relations. The material on female genital cutting in this volume may be especially useful for discussions in undergraduate classes. While many feminists see female genital cutting as oppressive and destructive to women’s bodies, others argue that such depictions don’t capture the more nuanced reality of the practice or the reasons for its cultural importance. Maria Frederika Malmström’s article on Cairo women’s practices of cooking, depilating, and circumcising shows how all three 776 Reviews

Gender and Sexuality in Muslim Cultures

coordination between them and their white counterparts—until about 1886, when issues of social equality and party politics undid the coalition. In the more newly developed Atlanta, by contrast, blacks had no such history of organization and civic engagement, and they were largely discounted as potential allies by white Knights. The importance of a “fit” between narrative and local experience appears, too, in the contrast between Georgia and Virginia Populism. In Georgia, a rapid increase in tenant farming, afflicting whites and blacks alike, supported organization of both white and “Colored” Farmers’ Alliances, and here the People’s Party made an effort to solicit black votes. But it proved all too easy for opponents to play the race card, and interracial electoral politics collapsed within two years. Even that record, however, outpaced Virginia’s, where conditions favoring coalition were more limited to a few sections of the state and quickly overwhelmed by racialized political conflict. Gerteis’s emphasis on differences in local experiences is well-taken, although he sometimes strains to magnify them: the contrasts are less between the presence and absence of interracial coalitions than a matter of how long it took racial coalitions, fragile even in the best of circumstances, to break down. But he uses the local cases in another worthwhile way, to provide a more eventful account of the deployment of republican categories in actual struggles unfolding over time. And in doing so, he can avoid essentialism and show how actors themselves defined and redefined their interests. Gerteis might have complemented his other comparisons by using these cases in a third way, as temporal cases offering additional analytical leverage. This would, for example, have allowed for a stronger demonstration of the constraints imposed by electoral politics: racial coalitions came undone as they moved in time from a focus on economic organizing to political campaigning. Class and the Color Line crosses borders of its own. It is a fine study of race and class in the United States—but also a skillful demonstration of comparative and historical methods and an impressive account of how organizational narratives shape social movement boundary work. It deserves a correspondingly wide readership. Textures of Struggle: The Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand, by Piya Pangsapa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. 217pp.

Textures of Struggle: The Emergence of Resistance among Garment Workers in Thailand

18.95 paper. ISBN: 9780801473760.