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Global struggles over women's roles, rights, and dress have taken center stage in a drama that casts the secular and the religious in tense if not violent opposition. Advocates for equality speak of the issue in terms of rights and modern progress while reactionaries ground their authority in religious and scriptural appeals. Both sides presume women's emancipation is tied to secularization. This volume upsets these certainties by blending diverse voices and traditions, both secular and religious, in studies historicizing, questioning, and testing the implicit links between secularism and expanded freedoms for women. Rather than treat secularism as the answer to conflicts over gender and sexuality, these essays show how it structures the conditions generating them.
List of contents
Preface and AcknowledgmentsPart 1 by Gendering the Divide1. Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference: An Introduction, by Linell E. Cady and Tracy Fessenden2. Secularism and Gender Equality, by Joan Wallach Scott3. Sexuality and Secularism, by Saba Mahmood4. Must It Be Either Secular or Religious? Reflections on the Contemporary Journeys of Women's Rights Activists in Egypt, by Azza Karam5. Religion and Women's Political Mobilization, by Ann BraudePart 2 by Gender and the Privatization of Religion6. Secular Liberalism, Roman Catholicism, and Social Hierarchies: Understanding Multiple Paths, by Gene Burns7. Gendering the Secular and Religious in Modern Egypt: Woman, Family, and Nation, by Margot Badran8. Women, Religion, and Politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Zilka Spahi?- iljakPart 3 by Gender, Sexuality, and the Body Politic9. Bodies-Politics: Christian Secularism and the Gendering of U.S. Policy, by Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini10. Crimes of Moral Turpitude: Questions at the Borders of Religion, the Secular, and the U.S. Nation-State, by Molly K. McGarry11. On French Religions and Their Renewed Embodiments, by Nacira Guenif-SouilamasPart 4 by Bridging the Divide12. Rescued by Law? Gender and the Global Politics of Secularism, by Elizabeth Shakman Hurd13. The Brahmin Widow and Female Religious Agency: Anticaste Critique in Two Modern Indian Texts, by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan14. Issues with Authority: Feminist Commitments in a Late Secular Age, by David Kyuman KimBibliographyContributorsIndex
About the author
Linell E. Cady is professor of religious studies and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University. Tracy Fessenden is associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University.
