We will describe the occasion for this volume—namely, our collective/respective problems with finding a textbook that took critical account of the categories “religion” and “gender” as analytical categories and rhetorical devices rather than stable or experiential realities. Our difficulty in locating a text that took up both terms at once in constructive ways, we suggest, is illustrative of a larger theoretical tension in the fields of gender studies and religious studies. Namely, it is often the case that when one is complicated or subjected to discourse analysis, the other is left unanalyzed, mystified, or used in a normative manner.

This chapter will provide an intellectual history of social constructionism and how discourse on gender as a social construct developed as a response to appeals to a stable, biologically predetermined gendered reality. With surveys of the “waves” of feminism, we will discuss the utility and limitations of the sex/gender dichotomy that emerged to make initial sense of constructionist approaches. In so doing, we will also introduce Judith Butler’s distinction between “performance” and “performativity,” discussing some of the implications of this distinction. Finally, we will offer an analysis of and response to contemporary scholarship on that political and fraught category called “the body.”

Identifications of both gender and religion rely heavily upon identifications of similarity and difference, familiarity and exoticism, both with respect to gender and sexuality and religions themselves. How do we mark “otherness”? Where does it live, geographically and culturally? What does it look like, and how do we use prior understandings of what/who is familiar in order to identify it? How do we strategically use what is alien to denature what students take as natural? Conversely, how do we use what they take to be natural to illuminate what is alien? Along with offering answers to these questions, we will discuss how “otherness” is subsequently policed and what modes of social anxiety are present in such policing. We will draw from examples in the classroom regarding the often unconsciously held? thresholds seemingly present for our students as they go about identifying otherness. Similarly, our own pedagogical choices in determining the case studies to introduce or not introduce are telling.

In this chapter, we will discuss the rationales and rhetorics behind liberalism and “open-mindedness” and the limits of these seemingly progressive politics. The impulse to dismiss as close-minded those with whom they disagree, or the desire to simply do away with labels where identity is concerned is a tempting one for students and scholars alike. However, similar problems are present with such impulses as those that would advocate for racial “colorblindness.” In the name of inclusivity, what boundaries are being drawn and what exclusions are occurring? How are those exclusions legitimated, mystified, or naturalized? How does the theoretical intervention of poststructuralism help us to confront and reckon with the universalizing “good intentions” of liberalism?

Appeals to experience as a primary site of authority and legitimacy still dominate within gender studies and religious studies. This chapter will introduce standpoint theory—its appearance on the stage of identity studies, its possibilities, and its pitfalls. We will discuss the heuristic and political utility of stable identity monikers (like “women” and “Christians,” just to name a couple of examples) for activist groups hoping to implement social and political change. We will also discuss the limits of appeals to political pragmatism as ends in themselves.

Our conclusion will be something of a visionary look ahead or manifesto for the future of scholarly discourse on gender and religion. Offering some examples of work that we have found most intellectually satisfying in our own classrooms, we will look at the state of the fields and offer new directions for thinking through “gender” and “religion” as co-constitutive categories.