17. Competing Economies in Studies of Identity and Religion
Discourses of Crisis and the Study of Religion - Lauren Horn Griffin
K. Merinda Simmons [+]
University of Alabama
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Description
Demonstrating the ways in which discourses of “crisis” in the academy are necessarily economically inflected, this chapter explores the roles that considerations of class play in identity studies more broadly. Specifically, the essay shows how identitarian claims (so frequently invoked in crisis-rhetoric) too often foreclose the intersectional approaches those claims nominally advance. This foreclosure occurs when the former employs analyses of specific economies of meaning to the exclusion of specific economies of capital. Intersectionality, however, demands active attention to the structural apparatuses constituting both economies simultaneously. Different and more interesting work becomes possible when those modes of economy are neither conflated nor dichotomized.