Социология религии_общее (англ.) / Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

source of empowerment (Griffin 2000; Foltz 2000; Neitz 1990). Looking at female and male countercultural spiritual seekers who were unaffiliated with Goddess worshipping groups, Bloch (1997) found that women spoke about finding validation through Goddess imagery, and both women and men spoke of the need for balance between God and Goddess. Men did not speak about gender inequalities, but rather about seeing the Goddess “in terms of nurturing and assistance” (1997: 189). Berger (1998) discusses the ramifications of reimagining deity as God and Goddess for gender relations and child rearing in a neopagan community. Neitz (2000) further explores the ramifications of neopaganism for gender identity and sexuality. The essay “Queering the Dragonfest” looks at gender-bending and the disruption of heteronormitivity that occurs among witches with a postpatriarchal ideology. The essay narrates a story about witches who create a religion in which sexuality is sacred, and remove from it assumptions of patriarchy. In so doing, they create the possibility for a “queering” of heterosexuality allowing for play with and among sexualities and genders.9

Feminist perspectives constitute a reference point for the authors of the studies reviewed here. The studies themselves are a part of an ongoing conversation about women and gender in the sociology of religion. All extend our knowledge about gender and religion. They challenge conventional conceptualizations to varying degrees. Marginal locations, while neither necessary or sufficient, often disrupt taken for granted ideas and help us see things differently, in part because studies that locate subjects away from the centers of organized religion are more likely to also find that the theories and concepts of the discipline do not quite fit. This experience of “not fitting” is the origin of the paradigmatic shift that birthed feminist sociology. In the next section, I explore a type of feminist theorizing that begins in the acknowledgment of the bifurcation of consciousness between the experiences of women and mainstream sociology.

THE FEMINIST THEORY AS A METHOD OF INQUIRY

In 1985, Barrie Thorne and Judith Stacey, in their famous essay, “The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology,” stated that feminist theory in sociology had been less successful in causing a paradigm shift in the discipline of sociology than it had in history or anthropology. Although acknowledging the many contributions, they argued that, within sociology, feminism has been contained and coopted. In part, they thought this reflected the fragmented nature of the discipline, but they argued it also reflected dominant methodologies and positivist traditions which place a value on knowledge phrased in abstract and universal terms. Stacey and Thorne pointed to the Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith as someone in sociology who is “reconsidering the relationship between knower and known to develop a method of inquiry that will preserve the presence of the subject as an actor and experiencer” (1985: 309). The promise of

9This last article points to an emerging body of literature on gay and lesbian experiences with organized religion. I have not included this literature here because it rarely problematizes gender in an explicit way. For examples, see Dillon (1999a) for a discussion of Dignity’s confrontation with the heterosexist policies of the Catholic church; Ponticelli (1999) studied Exodus International, a Christian organization dedicated to supporting groups which encourage gays and lesbians to reconstruct their sexual identities as straight. The anthropologist Ellen Lewin’s (1998) study of gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies suggests possibilities for studying religious practices of gays and lesbians outside of the institutions.

feminist theory is in its proposal for a method of inquiry that calls us to a different way of doing sociology. In what follows, I present Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins as proponents of a feminist epistemological shift.

Dorothy Smith: Institutional Ethnography and the Relations of Ruling

Dorothy Smith began publishing her project, the developing “sociology for women” in the mid-1970s. Although sometimes difficult to read, this evolving body of work speaks to an increasing number of secondand third-wave feminist sociologists, women and men.10 Trained in ethnomethodology and Marxism, Smith critiqued the positivist assumptions of mainstream sociology and advocated for an “interested sociology,” a sociology that began from women’s experience. In early writings, Smith described her own foundational experience as a graduate student, in which the theories and concepts of sociology constituted a separate cognitive domain from the experience she had as an adult woman, a mother. She did not experience the two different cognitive domains simply as “alternatives” but rather as a “bifurcated consciousness” (1987: 17–43; 45– 104).

Smith came to understand her own experiences as a woman and a sociologist in the context of the women’s liberation movement. She writes:

Beginning in women’s experience told in women’s words was and is a vital political moment in the women’s movement. Experience is a method of speaking that is not preappropriated by the discourses of the relations of ruling. This is where women began to speak from as the women’s movement of our time came into being. . . . In this political context the category of “women” is peculiarly non-exclusive since it was then and has remained open-ended, such that the boundaries established at any one point are subject to the disruptions of women who enter speaking from a different experience, as well as an experience of difference. (1997: 394)

In recent years, as students have taken up her approach to understand “how things happen” to other groups, Smith has come to call her project a “people’s sociology” (1999: 5). Although earlier discussions have tended to frame the contribution of Smith, as well as Collins and others, in terms of “standpoint theory,” that term is used in widely varying ways by different authors, and Smith now rejects it for herself.11 I focus my discussion here on Smith’s method of inquiry, institutional ethnography. In conjunction with her students, Smith has continued to develop institutional ethnography as a way of studying structures of power beginning in the location of particular people living their everyday lives (DeVault 1998; Campbell and Manicom 1995). Smith and her students intend that information uncovered through such investigations will be useful for those working for social change.

10Smith writes of the importance of her continuing dialogs, especially with students, for her efforts to “to make plain just what it is which differentiates this way of doing sociology” (1999: 4).

11In her influential book, The Science Question in Feminism (1986) Sandra Harding classified three different types of feminist methodologies, and grouped together a number of writers who had used the term “standpoint,” including Smith. Within Harding’s broad purview, these scholars’ positions did indeed have something in common relative to the others Harding surveyed (whom she types “feminist empiricists” and “feminist postmodernists”). Yet their positions remain distinct from one another. See the debate in Signs (1997) 22: 341–402.

Institutional ethnography carries out the project of the women’s movement. Smith argued for a “sociology for women,” beginning with calling for the entry of women into sociology as subjects. This relocates the sociological subject. Smith asks us to begin in the everyday and everynight experience of ordinary women. The everyday world is neither transparent or obvious. The organizing logic of our everyday work lies elsewhere. For Smith, the job of sociologists is to discover how things are put together so that they “happen” to us in the ways that they do.

Smith wants us to start from the margins and look toward the centers of institutional power. In her early work, Smith argued that we should begin our research with “the standpoint of women” (1987). In Smith’s usage, this did not mean that all women share one same position. Rather, Smith was saying that analysis begins in the material world of women, rather than with social theories and concepts which are inherently objectfiying. When we use standard concepts we see ourselves and the worlds we study from the outside. Smith rejects the label “standpoint theorist,” because, as the above quote suggests, she does not see women as a group occupying a site of epistemic privilege.12 Instead, she argues that we begin with women’s subject location as embodied beings living in the material world, “situating the inquiry in the actualities of people’s living, beginning in the experiences of living, and understanding that inquiry and its product are in and of the same actuality” (1992: 90). It is a way of shifting the ground of knowing: Once one acknowledges that knowledge is socially organized, we can see it as an attribute of individual consciousness (1992: 91). The experience of women is a starting point, but not the ending point. Smith’s goal is not to analyze individual women but, rather, to enter into institutions from the position of those who experience them.13

Smith’s training as a Marxist is apparent in her understanding of social relations. Social relations coordinate activities through the work that people do. Smith is concerned with uncovering the organizational practices through which ordinary people orient themselves to institutions. The social for Smith is the concerting and organizing of activities. While Marx was concerned primarily with the organization of commodity production under capitalism, Smith believes that, at this point, the production of knowledge, ideology, and discourse constitute an essential aspect of what we need to analyze to understand the social relations of ruling. Smith sees language as an organizer of our activities. She has become increasingly interested with how texts mediate between actual practices (and the work that people do) and the discursive. It is often through texts that we enter into an institutional order. Smith reminds us that texts are crucial because power is generated and held in relations which we experience through texts, including the forms we fill out, or others fill out about us, and the cards that we carry (1992: 93). Smith offers a method of inquiry that starts with embodied individuals in the everyday and everynight world, looks at the work that they do, and how texts are present in their lives, mediating between them and the relations of ruling. The sociology that comes out of this meaning of inquiry is in process. Smith uses the metaphor of the map:

. . . The metaphor of the map directs us to a form of knowledge of the social that shows the relations between various and differentiated local sites of experience without

12The idea of the standpoint of women as a site of epistemic privilege is clearest in Nancy Hartsock’s (1983) feminist revision of historical materialism.

13See Scott (1991) for a discussion of the dangers of focusing solely on experience.

subsuming or displacing them. Such a sociology develops from inquiry and not from theorizing: it aims at discoveries enabling us to locate ourselves in the complex relations with others arising from and determining our lives; its capacity for truth is never contained in the text but arises in the map-reader’s dialogic of finding and recognizing in the world what the text, itself a product of such an inquiry, tells her she might look for. (1999: 130)

Smith advocates a disruption of how sociologists have understood theory. She looks for a dialogic form of theory, a feminist theory that begins in the experiences of women, and produces an active text, in dialogue with a reader.

Patricia Hill Collins: Black Feminist Thought and Intersectionality

Patricia Hill Collins’s project has some basic similarities with Smith. In Black Feminist Thought (1991), Hill Collins draws on the voices of black feminist writers and activists to make visible the subjugated knowledges of black women. Collins describes the condition of being “outsiders within” generated by the historical situation of black women’s role in retaining and transforming an Afrocentric world view in African-American communities while, at the same time, finding employment as domestic workers in white households. This particular location produced an angle of vision, allowing them to see contradictions in the construction of womanhood, a kind of consciousness that Collins sees produced in many of the setting in which black women in the United States today find themselves. Too often marginal to the movements of white women and black men, the lives of black women point to the intersections of race and gender as well as class.

Also classed as a standpoint theorist (Harding 1986), standpoint means something specific for Collins. It does not refer to the experience of an individual – rather a standpoint is the product of a group’s common experience of oppression, and it focuses on the social conditions that produce such experiences. Collins (1991) is one of the founding theorists of what is now being called the “intersectionality paradigm.” Standpoint and groups located through intersecting structures of oppression are intimately tied for Collins:

. . . Current attention to the theme of intersectionality situated within assumptions of group-based power relations reveals a growing understanding of the complexity of the processes both of the generating groups and accompanying standpoints. . . . What we have now is increasing sophistication about how to discuss group location, not in the singular social class framework proposed by Marx, nor the early feminist frameworks arguing the primacy of gender, but within constructs of multiplicity residing in social structures themselves, and not in individual women. Fluidity does not mean that groups themselves disappear, to be replaced by an accumulation of decontextualized unique women whose complexity erases politics. Instead the fluidity of boundaries operates as a new lens that potentially deepens understanding of how the actual mechanisms of institutional power can change dramatically while continuing to reproduce long standing inequalities of race, gender and class that result in group stability. (1997: 377)

For Collins, both standpoint and intersectionality are ways of talking about group-based oppression and group-based power relations.

In addition to her focus on the standpoint of black women, Collins differs from Smith in that she claims the value of alternative traditions, local knowledges which produce theorizing, often in narrative forms. She calls generations of black women, storytellers, writers, and activists organic intellectuals who offer forms of knowledge outside the circle of sociological insiders, but who have much to offer us, if we would listen to them. While Smith is not sure that knowledge as such can be transformative, and perceives a kind of division of labor between sociologists who reveal the relations of ruling and activists who use that knowledge to produce social change, Collins sees her project of voicing Black Feminist Thought as emancipatory.14 Collins believes that local knowledges can offer resistance to the dominant knowledge. Her understanding of the importance of local knowledges as tools for resisting the dominant culture is especially useful to sociologists of religion to help us reframe how we think about “religions of the disinherited” or religions of countercultural groups.

Both Smith and Collins write against positivism. What they offer is a different kind of “theory.” Rather than a totalizing theory, they offer a method of inquiry. They both offer a vision of sociology that is interested; that is critical. They contend that to be objective is to maintain the relations of ruling.15 They both understand that writers as well as subjects are located, and that location matters.16 In the next section, three examples demonstrate this kind of feminist inquiry in the sociology of religion.

BEGINNING IN THE LOCATION OF WOMEN

Beginning in the location of women requires a reorientation in the sociology of religion. It means moving outside the domain of pastors, public religion, formal organizations, denominational creed, and organizations. It suggests more attention to devotional practices, wider cultural discourse, bridging boundaries, and moving between public and private. It suggests more attention to religious practices and to religion outside the institutions. In this section, I discuss three recent works which are particularly rich in their implications for feminist work in the sociology of religion.

Nancy Nason-Clark: Breaking the Silence

Nancy Nason-Clark provides an important example of a scholar-activist whose work starts with the location of women. Nason-Clark’s work has focused on examining wife abuse within the context of the Protestant churches in the Maritime Provinces

14Collins (1997) argues that while Smith’s critique of the relations of ruling is powerful, Smith does not attend to the ways that subjugated knowledge provides alternatives.

15Sandra Harding’s (1986) notion of “strong objectivity” is useful here.

16To quote Smith: “The project of inquiry from the standpoint of women is always reflexive. Also, it is always about ourselves as inquirers – not just in our personal selves, but our selves as participants. The metaphor of insider and outsider contains an ambiguity that I should be more watchful of, for I disagree . . . that there is an outside in society. . . . As I have used the metaphor, I want to stress that those outside places are inside. In the sense I’m trying to capture there are no modes of investigation other than those beginning from within. . . . Established sociology has powerful ways of writing the social into the text, which produce society as seen from an Archimedes point. A sociology for women says: “You can’t have that wish.” There is no other way than beginning from the actual social relations in which we are participants. This fact can be concealed but not avoided” (1992: 94).

In Church and Community. Gilkes notes in the introduction that, “understanding the importance of women to the institutions of African American life and culture required immersion in the social worlds of black women” (2000: 1). Gilkes’s lifelong immersion in the worlds of black women community activists and church women is reflected in how she captures the constraints the women she studied face and their resistance against it in an account that is both celebratory and critical.

Several essays come from her research on gender relations within COGIC (Church of God in Christ). It is worth noting that this is not Gilkes’s own denomination. Gilkes’s experiences connect her to the women she studies, and her writing moves between locations using fully what she knows from listening to others, and what she knows from her own experiences. In these essays, she explores the relative autonomy of the women, and posits a “dual sex” political system within the black Holiness and Pentecostal churches. Although women could not be ordained, “community mothers” had power and authority. Gilkes notes that white and black women have different experiences in their churches which leads to different understandings of the problems. White women experience exclusion, tokenism, and isolation. Black women share with black men the experience of invisibility in a racialized society, but, in their churches, they are visible, coproducers of the black community.

In a chapter called “Some Mother’s Son and Some Father’s Daughter: Issues of Gender, Biblical Language and Worship,” Gilkes shows how churched and unchurched black women experience the sustaining power of their religious tradition. Gilkes asks, “What is the relationship between the importance of black women to the social construction of black religious knowledge and the ambivalent response of black women to white feminist movements?” (2000: 125). Her analysis of oral tradition and Afro-Christian practices explicates how preaching as a male discourse exists in interdependence with the response to the call. Women’s roles as prayer warriors, singers, and givers-of-testimony transform “private troubles” to “public issues” within a covenant community, and establishes their ownership in their churches and traditions.

Several of these essays show African-American women as cultural workers within their own communities. Yet the essays also reveal Gilkes’s concerns about the degree to which the historically black churches fail women, by refusing to ordain women and support them, and by failing to address the issue of cultural humiliation. Gilkes calls for an affirmation of life (2000: 194), which values black women. For Gilkes, speaking out of the African-American tradition, sacred centers are power centers organizing an alternative center of power against the relations of ruling. Gilkes is not uncritical of black churches, but she stands within the churches and speaks from the inside out.

Milagros Pena˜ : Border Crossings

The blurring of the boundaries between religious and nonreligious institutions, public and private, sacred and secular, and between grassroots politics and the politics of everyday life that we see in the works of Nason-Clark and Gilkes takes on an added dimension in the work of Milagros Pena˜ (see Pena,˜ Chapter 27, this volume). Focusing on a Woman’s Alliance that emerged among Anglos and Latinas on both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States, Pena˜ shows that religious women and lay women found commonalities on women’s issues, despite the fact that they were

divided by nationality. Working through their differences, women – some of whom had been marginalized in the Latino movement and in the women’s movement – mobilized around local issues presented for women in the border context. Pena˜ suggests that the border crisis created fields of opportunity, with a blurring of boundaries occurring on several levels. Pena’s˜ work is important here, in part because of her emphasis on starting with local context, but also for its contribution toward our understanding of the global aspects of women’s oppressions. Furthermore, her discussion of boundary crossing adds a critical dimension: We need conceptualizations that allow us to explore not just pastors, but congregations, and not just congregations but unbounded movements when that is where the women are.

These three authors follow a research strategy that starts with the experiences of women in a particular location but moves through that to an emergent understanding of institutions of oppression and movements of resistance. They do not impose abstract theories or categories developed outside upon their subjects; the process of inquiry itself is feminist, in part because they write as much for their subjects as about them. Their accounts are deep and rich contributions to what we know about the particularity of women’s lives and how women’s everyday lives intersect with religion.

CONCLUSION

Some of the issues and questions raised here have also been raised by observers of contemporary religion. For example, there is a sense that the old theories and categories are insufficient in the new work on “lived religion” (Hall 1997). There is a larger concern for the collapse of mainline hegemony in American culture. Some who are quite observant about what is going on in the religious scene, however, have not yet thought through fully what the epistemological consequences of the collapse are for the kind of work that we do: We can no longer speak with omniscient neutrality about American religion – if “we” ever could.17

Feminists are among those calling for research that begins but does not end in the experiences of the people we study. Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography is a methodology that helps researchers perform analyses that make connections from embodied individuals to work/practices to texts to discourses and the relations of ruling. Patricia Hill Collins draws our attention to the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, and shows us the power of the voices of alternative traditions. Feminist theory, as they envision it, reflects a new paradigm in sociology.

Researchers in the sociology of religion have made a substantial shift in the last two decades: Women are no longer absent; gender is no longer ignored. Attending to gender, however, cannot merely be a matter of “add women and stir.” Adding women has a wonderfully disruptive potential, especially when looking at women forces us to look in new places and at different things. Adding women raises questions about local practices and about embodiment, emotion, and sexuality. For sociologists of religion,

17As the essays in Spickard, Landres, and McGuire (2002) demonstrate, reflections on knowledge claims among scholars of religion are not limited to feminists, although feminists are well represented among the authors in the volume.

adding women is a dislocating act. New questions present themselves. Categories are problematized, and they can’t so easily be reestablished. Generalizations don’t hold. Feminist sociologists show us a world that is gendered, and they show why that matters. To do the feminist project advocated here entails the production of knowledges that are partial and located, and accountable to the open and ongoing discourse that is feminism.