Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 

About: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion is an academic journal published by Indiana University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Feminism & Feminist philosophy. It has an ISSN identifier of 1553-3913. Over the lifetime, 512 publications have been published receiving 2399 citations. The journal is also known as: JFSR.

Creating a Critical Faith-Centered Space for Antiracist Feminism: Reflections of a Muslim Scholar-Activist

Abstract: In this epigraph, Marnia Lazreg writes about the tribulations of writing as an Algerian woman about women in Algeria.' The idea of being able to com municate \"another mode of being female\" within feminist discourses is indeed a difficult task, because the legitimate articulations of the category of \"female\" have been discursively drawn and mapped in ways that privilege a particular construction of womanhood based on Western, liberal, secular notions.2 As M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty note, \"There is a conver gence between the way gender emerged as a primary category of analysis and the social, demographic, and class composition of those who actually theorized

Islamic Feminism in Iran: Feminism in a New Islamic Context

Abstract: Challenging the clergy’s monoclinic interpretational power, Islamic feminists in Iran, by emphasizing the historical context of the holy texts and reformulating Islamic concepts and law from a “fem ...

Islam, feminism, and Islamic feminism: between inadequacy and inevitability

Abstract: This essay argues for maintaining a critical space between two intellectual paradigms that inform Muslim women’s anticolonial equality struggles in the neocolonial present, Islam and feminism. Seedat distinguishes between scholarly trends that preclude the convergence of Islam and feminism, that argue for a necessary convergence, and finally, those that make no argument for or against the convergence but “take Islam for granted” using feminist methods suited to various reform aspirations. The last group may consider their work the natural continuation of historical Muslim consciousness of the treatment of women or as redress for the historical absence of sex equality in Islam. This article argues that Islamic feminism may appear to be the inevitable result of the convergence of Islam and feminism yet it is also inadequate to concerns for sex equality in Islam. Not only do some scholars resist the naming but, as an analytic construct, Islamic feminism also precludes new understandings of sex difference originating in non-Western and anticolonial cultural paradigms.

God's Love and Women's Love: Prison Chaplains Counsel the Wives of Nazi Perpetrators

Abstract: Stating the obvious statistical fact that the overwhelming majority of per petrators of genocide are men elicits charges of essentialism and suspicions of women's claims to moral superiority and innocence. This essay intends to reaf firm that genocide is "men's work." However, the supportive stance of wives of convicted perpetrators of the Holocaust that emerges from primary documents in the postwar period exposes feminist and patriarchal assumptions of women's moral innocence as seriously flawed.1 The Nazi Holocaust was envisioned, planned, and implemented by Ger man men. German women were kept out of positions of power and leadership and hence cannot be held personally accountable for the "final solution." The unspeakable atrocities of the ghettos, concentration camps, and Einsatzgrup pen (extermination squads) are largely associated with male violence. Although some women were engaged in heinous brutality, by beating and torturing vic tims and prove that women can be just as cruel and violent as men, their ex amples stand out. The cruelty of some women such as the "SS beast," Ilse Koch, wife of the camp commander of Buchenwald, and that of other female SS-associated guards in concentration camps, such as Irma Grese in Auschwitz and others in the Ravensbriick women's concentration camp, has become infa mous and continues to inspire the pornographic mind.2 Their sadism may well

Christian origins, egalitarianism, and utopia

Abstract: In recent years, several scholars have challenged the widely held hypothesis that the historical Jesus and the kingdom of God movement were egalitarian, but that as early as the time of Paul the early church began conforming to the nonegalitarian norms of the ancient Mediterranean world. In particular, "feminist myths of Christian origins" have been criticized for anachronistically projecting contemporary gender egalitarian ideals back into the first century. Beavis critiques this argument, especially as presented by John Elliott, and suggests that opposition to the "egalitarian theory," much like Cynthia Eller's The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, sets up a biased and incomplete account of feminist reconstructions of Christian origins, and then proceeds to refute it. As such, appealing to "feminist myths" of proto-Christian egalitarianism may be used, much like Eller's book, to discredit feminist scholarship and spirituality. Beavis shows that the basileia movement expresses egalitarian ideals—including gender egalitarianism—similar to those of other ancient utopian writings and movements.