Gender and culture: challenges to the sociology of religion.
Sociology of Religion › Vol. 65 Nbr. 4, December 2004
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Gender and culture: challenges to the sociology of religion.
The cultural turn has had an enormous impact in sociology. While few sociologists have embraced the radical postmodernisms of Baudrillard (1988), or Lyotard (1979), the attention to language, discourse and text common to a broad array of post-structuralist thinkers (Derrida 1987; Foucault 1978, 1979; Geertz 1973) has provided a useful challenge to sociology and provided new ways of thinking about some of the persistent problems in our field. Rather than seeing the cultural turn as foreshadowing the end of sociology as we know it, I see the writings of particular authors as a productive challenge that can help us in the sociology of religion do what we do better. In particular, I argue that the movement away from binary categories leads to a more relational conceptualization of the self, and combined with ideas about discourse and text, this thinking about relationality leads to an exploration of narrativity both as a representational mode and as a social epistemology. I see these aspects of the cultural turn occurring alongside (a) the political activism associated with what have come to be called the new social movements, and (b) the development of similar ideas among feminist scholars. Much of this article will sketch the congruences between feminist theories and methodologies and certain aspects of the cultural turn. I will say less about how gender and sexuality are at the core of religious identification and practice, having developed that argument in other places, especially my writings on neo-pagans and witches (e.g. Neitz 2000).
RELATIONAL SELVES: MOVING BEYOND BINARY OPPOSITIONS Sociological categories developed in conjunction with grand narratives that attempted to explain modernity in terms ...See the full content of this document
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