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Feminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race-based oppression. This book proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better comprehend and confront the systematic disempowerment of women and marginalized groups.
Utilising feminist and post-colonial analysis of access, equity and violence, contributors draw on recent critical theory to collapse accepted boundaries between religion and secularity with the aim of understanding that religion is a technology of governance in its function, meaning and history.
The volume includes case studies focusing on how the category of religion is deployed to perpetuate male hegemony and racist inequities in Australia, Mexico, the United States, Britain and Canada. This trenchant feminist critique and academic analysis will be of key interest to scholars and students of Religion, Sociology, Political Science and Gender Studies.
List of contents
Introduction
- The Religious is Political
Naomi Goldenberg
- Religion as a Vestigial State: A Comment on Religion, Gender and Violence
Kathleen McPhillips
- Towards an Understanding of Femicide: Contemporary (Patriarchal) State Violence in Juárez, Mexico
Larisa Garrett
- E Pluribus Patriarchy: Religion and State in the Contemporary US
Elizabeth A. Pritchard
- Multifaithism and Secularism in the UK
Sukhwant Dhaliwal
- Vestigial State Theory and Law in Canada: A Critical Response
Peggy Schmeiser
- Church and State Power in Canada: The Colonial Project and its Continued Impact on Indigenous Women
Barbara Greenberg
- Ceremony and the Symbolic Re-Appropriation of Indigeneity: A Feminist Critique of Settler Colonialism in a Progressive Liberal Democratic Nation-State
Stacie Swain
- The Liberalisation of Modern Catholic Social Thought: Contextualising Catholic Anti-Feminism and Homophobia in a Vestigial State
Andrew Pump
- The End of Religion—The End of Man
Geraldine Finn
- Iconographies of Modernity: Figures of Religion, Authority and Gender in the ‘Secular’ State
Yvonne Sherwood
About the author
Kathleen McPhillips is a sociologist of religion and gender in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia.
Naomi Goldenberg is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada.
Summary
This book proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better comprehend and confront the systematic disempowerment of women and marginalized groups.
