Introduction

Perhaps the most surprising current development in the feminist engagement with religious tradition, with its correlate sub-group of religious people engaging in different ways with feminism, is that it is a field that continues to exist at all. Given the overt antipathy between these two putative “sides,” feminism and religion, and the high level of contentiousness that, since its inception, has been a pointed feature of their mutual encounter, one might have expected their interest in each other, and in the field itself, to have waned—or, more accurately, to have played itself out. After all, how much patience does anyone have to stand in judgment—no matter how sophisticated—of another, or to stand and be judged, even through an academic, theoretical lens? A scenario in which, after a few years of recriminations, academic and otherwise, the religious would have returned to their insulated communities, and the feminists either to their ivory towers, or to political and social movements, would likely not have surprised many people.

And yet, not only has this conversation failed to die down—it appears to be more vibrant than ever. The presence of serious thinkers and personalities within feminist religious studies has only grown. For many feminist women and men, religion continues to be a place they not only return to for comfort, but also continually and substantively revisit, with passion and rigor, engaging and reengaging, resisting and analyzing in a diversity of ways.

This robust proliferation of dialogue says more to me about the current state of feminist religious studies than any one insight. It says that certain truisms no longer can withstand even mild scrutiny. Whereas once it might have been possible to take for granted that religion is inherently oppressive in its patriarchal hierarchies, we must note that if it were exclusively oppressive, more people, and certainly more feminists, would have made a clean break. Instead, we have Muslim academics like Fadwa El Guindi claiming the veil as tool of feminist liberation, making the provocative claim that a feminist ethos can animate a decision to cover oneself—as an exercise of free choice over one’s own body—as much as it can to uncover. We have Orthodox Jewish women claiming—insisting—that their little hairbands constitute a fulfillment of the Jewish legal statute requiring married women to cover their hair. In my own research, I have heard women express a wide range of feelings about the traditional Jewish woman’s menstrual rites, from enthusiasm, to indifference, to contempt—sometimes all voiced by the same woman! And I have watched gay men and women, who readily acknowledge that their sexuality is delegitimized and even criminalized within traditional Jewish thinking and law, converting to much higher levels of observance, in some cases becoming Orthodox.

What binds these people—what binds all of us—to remain within this seemingly endless conversation?

First, there seems to be a kind of intuitive awareness that religion cannot be reduced to familiar, if ultimately facile, dichotomies. Religion is neither inherently oppressive, nor secularism inherently limited; feminism is neither wholly empowering nor disempowering. To the contrary: perhaps feminism and religion need each other, to keep each other honest, to compel and inspire ever-deepening levels of introspection and analysis. For example, in my own work interviewing Orthodox women about different subjects, I began to notice that much of the structural analysis designed to infer meanings from the study of religious ritual and texts did not sufficiently take into account the lived experiences of women who spent their days actually practicing the rituals and reading the texts. I detected and reported a surprisingly wide range of responses from these women, as I did from the gay men and women I interviewed about Jewish Orthodoxy. These experiences forced me to develop new interview strategies and research methods, and new theoretical frameworks to account for the diversity of responses, in a process paralleling the work of many of my colleagues in pioneering new fields, new routes to new knowledge.

One reason, I think, for the tenacity with which feminism and religion have held onto each other, is that, on the one hand, sexuality...