Introduction
Gender - K. Merinda Simmons
K. Merinda Simmons [+]
University of Alabama
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K. Merinda Simmons is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Graduate Director of the Religion in Culture MA Program at the University of Alabama. Her books include Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora (Ohio State UP, 2014), The Trouble with Post-Blackness (co-edited with Houston A. Baker, Jr., Columbia UP, 2015), and Race and New Modernisms (co-authored with James A. Crank, Bloomsbury, 2019). She is editor of the book series Concepts in the Study of Religion: Critical Primers (Equinox).
Description
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.