Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
6. Privatized Publics and Scholarly Silos: Gender, Religion, and their Theoretical Fault Lines
Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
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
This essay takes up Naomi Goldenberg’s interest in the construction of the private realm as a place where violence in the name of religion is often permitted. It discusses how scholars of religion are often ready and willing to politically deconstruct the category of religion even as they fail to see the politics that underlie other categories, and considers how this plays out in the case of gender.