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. (shrink)

In this paper, Weir reconsiders identity politics and their relation to feminist solidarity. She argues that the dimension of identity as “identification-with” has been the liberatory dimension of identity politics, and that this dimension has been overshadowed and displaced by a focus on identity as category. Weir addresses critiques of identification as a ground of solidarity, and sketches a model of identity and identity politics based not in sameness, but in transformative historical process.

(1999). Difference as an occasion for rights: A feminist rethinking of rights, liberalism, and difference. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 2, Feminism, Identity and Difference, pp. 27-55.

In Pakistan, as in many other societies, politico-religious movements or so-called Islamist fundamentalist movements are becoming an important site for women's activism as well as the harnessing of such activism to promote agendas that seem to undermine women's autonomy. This has become a concern for a growing feminist literature which from a variety of political and theoretical positions seeks to understand and explain the subject-position of Muslim women as politico-religious activists. This paper attempts a deconstructive reading of texts by leading (...) Pakistani feminist scholars as they attempt the difficult process of steering between fundamentalism and Orientalism in their accounts of ‘fundamentalist’ women in the political ideological space of Pakistan. (shrink)

The sociology of revolution has produced a prodigious body of scholarship that is nonetheless deficient in one area: attention to gender in the unfolding of revolutions and in the building of new states. Feminist scholars, however, have been attentive to women's participation in revolutions, the effects of revolutions on gender systems and women's positions, and how gender shapes revolutionary processes, including patterns of mobilization, revolutionary programs, and the policies of revolutionary states. This article discusses the literature on revolutions, presents a (...) theoretical framework for the study of revolutions based on gender outcomes, and examines two cases of revolutionary transformation that conform to what I call the patriarchal model of revolution: Iran in 1979 and the 1989 revolutions in East Central Europe. (shrink)

This article discusses ways in which feminist scholars draw upon agency in relation to the complex subject matter of women's engagement in so-called `fundamentalist' movements. While postcolonial critiques generally reject the term `fundamentalism', and in particular the way it is linked to Islam, feminist perspectives have a vested interest in looking at contemporary developments in different religions from the perspective of women's lives. Against the patriarchal reputations of fundamentalist movements, feminist scholarship increasingly tends to emphasize women's agency, thereby effectively breaking (...) with widespread notions of `false consciousness'. After briefly discussing two such examples, the question is raised whether this emphasis on agency does not risk evacuating structural constraints in the construction of subjectivity, thus neutralizing the productive tension, at the heart of women's studies, between structure and agency. In conclusion, the article joins other calls for new ways of thinking about subjectivity. (shrink)