Religious cultures and gender cultures: tracing gender differences across religious cultures

ABSTRACT

This special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Religion focuses on varying empirical connections and theoretical relations between ‘religion’ and ‘gender’. The introduction to this special issue suggests a theoretical approach which is sensitive to culture by drawing on a phenomenological understanding of culture that is based on knowledge and meaning production and sense making. At first sight, this may not sound convincing because ‘culture’ is a category that is most notably used in combination with religion and gender in culturalist ways. In the migration societies of contemporary Europe, religion has become a metaphor for cultural difference and symbolic boundary-making. The core element of this approach is the conceptualisation of culture as a social web consisting of symbolic forms based on signs of meaning that shape social action, orientation, and experience in the world, including the religious sphere. This entails an understanding of religion as a distinct province of meaning that is structured by processes of social symbolisation just like any other sphere of life. This approach reveals that culturalist conceptions of both religion and gender have specific social meanings as meaningful signs in the symbolic order of secular modernity.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• religion
• culture
• globalisation
• Islam
• symbolic boundary-making
• religious knowledge

Understanding the empirical connections and theoretical relations between ‘religion’ and ‘gender’ is a challenge. To begin with, gender theoretical approaches in religious research are a broad transdisciplinary field that ranges from gender historical and theological to feminist sociological and ethnological perspectives. Although there is a consensual acknowledgement of gender as an analytical lens, its methodological and theoretical adaptation visibly varies from one research context to another (Woodhead 2001; Woodhead 2007; Hawthorne 2009; Neitz 2003; Neitz 2014).¹ As a consequence, the social situatedness of knowledge production on gender is a challenge sui generis; theoretical perspectives related to postcolonialism and globalisation indicate the social variety of gendered realities across religious cultures. Nevertheless, for a long time, religious research has mainly examined gender arrangements in Christian traditions (Neitz 2003, 280; Höpflinger, Jeffers, and Pezzoli-Olgiati 2008; Mommertz and Opitz-Belakhal 2008). This is accompanied by a tendency to apply theoretical concepts often methodologically and epistemically unchanged to non-European contexts, which risks misinterpretation of social developments, given Western (European) interpretations of sociality (Matthes 1993; Asad 1993). An additional challenge in gender theoretical approaches in religious research is the neglect of intersections with other axes of social difference, for example, class or ethnicity (Neitz 2003). Overall, due to the global multiplicity of gendered realities and the variety of lived religions, the research area of ‘gender’ and ‘religion’ is extremely diverse. This leads to the question which theoretical perspective is open enough to conceive—approximately—the variety of social practices, meaning making, and interpretation of gendered life across religious cultures. I suggest that a theoretical approach which is sensitive to culture by drawing on the understanding of culture, based on knowledge and meaning, provides the necessary conceptual openness.

At first sight, this may not sound convincing, because ‘culture’ is a category that is most notably used in combination with ‘religion’ and ‘gender’ in culturalist and stereotyping ways.² In the migration societies of contemporary Europe, religion has even become a metaphor for cultural difference and symbolic boundary-making, with Islam and ‘its gender order’ serving as the epitome of otherness (Bauman 2016). As religion is often viewed as a publicly unintelligible form of knowledge in the liberal-secularist worldview (Asad 1993), the Islamic religion and Muslim actors are easily conceivable as the paradigmatic ‘cultural others’.³ Consequently, disputes about the social positioning of religion often unfold as a kind of Kulturkampf between secularist, or anti-religious, and religious worldviews.⁴ Just as the contrast with Catholicism was, for example, nurtured for “distinctive purposes”⁵ in the cultural Protestantism of Prussia around 1900 (Tyrell 2008, 106), cultural difference is now socially accentuated in contrast to the Islamic religion, not least when right-wing populists claim to represent the dominant culture (Leitkultur)⁶ as distinct from ‘the culture’ of ‘the religious others’.⁷ This pattern of culturalist symbolic boundary-making can be traced back to conflict-laden debates about modernisation and secularisation in the nineteenth century, particularly in the late nineteenth century. The debates carried a strong culturalist undertone, but sociologically, they were interpreted from the theoretical perspective of secularisation, as modernisation conflicts that resulted from the “logic of differentiation or rationalization of modern societies” (Borutta 2014, 109).⁸ De facto, the separation of politics and religion—and the latter’s privatisation—was part and parcel of encompassing publicly enacted cultural contentions. The religious controversies in France and Germany around 1900 are apposite examples (Koenig and Willaime 2008).⁹

Just as the social position and meaning of religion were a central subject of debate around 1900, gender was considered to be one of the “central cultural problems” at the time (Lichtblau 1996, 281; Planert 2000). Against the backdrop of political and economic revolutions, social transformation towards a capitalist society was perceived to be fundamentally a crisis. This was accompanied by a strong culturally pessimist literary and political discourse about the antinomies of modernity (Koselleck 1959), with ‘the gender and women’s question’ a core element of this controversy. The process resulted in a cultural re-coding of the gender order, which became a central pillar of the new bourgeois national order (Fraisse 1995; Yuval Davis 1997). Accordingly, the Kulturkampf also had a gender facet; this is best exemplified by the way women’s public religious commitment—for example, their work in congregations—was denigrated as a “threat to the bourgeois model of [social] spheres” (Borutta 2014, 113). From a liberal bourgeois perspective, the place of both women and religion was envisioned to be in the private sphere.

This exemplary reflection of culturalist perspectives on religion and gender does not speak against, but in favour of, a theoretical approach that is sensitive to culture-theoretical approaches in religious research. The core element is the conceptualisation of culture as a social web consisting of symbolic forms based on signs of meaning that shape social action, orientation, and experience in the world, including the religious sphere. This entails an understanding of religion as a distinct province of meaning that is structured by processes of social symbolisation just like any other sphere of life (Schütz and Luckmann 1984).¹⁰ In this view, every action—not only religious action—is inherently symbolic and generates meaning. This meaning develops from experience in social interaction; it is categorised and tied to a concrete meaningful sign. Particular experiences and actions recall specific symbolic meanings, such as kissing an icon, foot washing before prayer or specific body movements during prayer. Viewed from this perspective, religion is understood as being principally social and part of the social lifeworld that is structured by a commonly shared system of social categorisations and typifications (Schütz 1974). Religious agents act in the religious sphere by reference to socio-cultural meaning and orientation in the same way as they do in other parts of the lifeworld. Consequently, religion is discernible as an historically developed system of meaning and interpretation, based on symbolic forms, whereby humans communicate, preserve, and develop their knowledge of, and their attitudes towards, life (Geertz 1987).

As Hubert Knoblauch (1999, 12) emphasises with reference to Alfred Schütz (1962, 335), the “symbolic forms, however, in which elements of other realities are appresented ‘are as manifold as the symbols appresenting them’”. As a result, Western European societies, for example, develop particular—not universal—forms of symbolic universes, whether in terms of ‘gender’ or ‘religion’ (Winkel 2012; Winkel 2017). This approach reveals that culturalist conceptions of both ‘religion’ and ‘gender’ have specific social meanings as meaningful signs in the symbolic order of “secular modernity” (Kröhnert-Othmann 2014), namely as categories and markers of identity—and alterity—that allow for symbolic boundary-making. This is mirrored by not only the above-mentioned debates at the turn of the nineteenth century, but also contemporary controversies where gender and religion again take centre stage, as core elements of a worldview in which nationality, secularism, and the heteronormative gender matrix are reproduced as fundamental symbolic pillars of the social order (Winkel 2018b). This develops against the backdrop of the growing multi-religious differentiation of European societies, which is sociologically understood as pluralisation.¹¹ However, in a culturalist perspective, pluralisation is predominantly perceived as a challenge of the cultural order, if not as a threat; this is, for example, apparent in states treating Muslim migrants as a security problem (Lazaridis and Wadia 2015; Carastathis 2018). Nilüfer Göle (2008; 2016) explains the mistrust of Muslims—among others—as an effect of their visibility as religious agents in the public sphere.¹² This presence subverts the public–private distinction and opposes the liberal-secularist notion of religion as a private matter—the topoi that determined cultural debates as early as 1900. As a consequence, Islam is conceived as the paradigmatic ‘other’ today; this conception includes culturalist ascriptions of identity, ranging between denigration and exoticisation, characterised by Edward Said (1978) as orientalisation. As manifold studies have shown, gender and sexuality are important elements of this orientalisation (see e.g. Attia 2009; Hajjat and Mohammed 2013; Modood 2019). This is a prevailing pattern of the culturalist mode of symbolic boundary-making discussed above. While the social situation of Muslim women is viewed as fundamentally incompatible with the standards of Western European equality and human rights (Rommelspacher 2009), the ‘dangerous sexuality of Arab men’ is societally discussed as ‘cultural’ and this naturally translates as being rooted in religion.¹³ Consequently, symbolic boundary-making develops once more at the demarcation line of the ‘secularism versus religion’ issue, with a clear tendency to racialise ‘Muslim others’ due to the supposed fundamental cultural incompatibility of Islam with Western European gender concepts and secular standards. This goes hand in hand with a normative understanding of religion as a key factor which shapes gender beliefs, such as religious doctrines that legitimate the control of women’s sexuality. In this perspective, religion is envisioned as a hegemonic cultural resource that can be clearly separated from ‘secular’ gender notions and that determines the conduct and purpose of life as an asymmetric, gendered institution.

The contributions of the special issue on Religious Cultures and Gender Cultures illuminate these processes in various marked ways. In their study on “The Gendering of Heterosexual Religious Young Adults’s Imagined Future”, Sarah-Jane Page and Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip raise the question of the extent to which religious belonging makes a difference to young adults’ future imaginings. The findings show that religion definitely plays a significant role across various religions, not in contrast to ‘secular’ norms, but rather as part of the young adults’ cultural tapestry, in which marriage and parenthood also play a significant role from the perspective of ‘secular’ norms. The authors develop an understanding of culture that is co-produced by religion, while religious culture is understood in broad terms, comprising various facets which range from texts to rituals and symbols as well as religious specialists and material artefacts. Religious norms and values are identified as offering a crucial backdrop to the way the young adults imagine their future. While ideals like marriage remain predominantly uncontested due to their status as symbolic glue in all examined religious communities, it becomes obvious that hegemonic cultural patterns—like the hegemonic model of the male breadwinner that contradicts gender equality principles—are mainly substantiated by traditional gender norms and ‘not simply’ because of religious tradition, as Page and Yip point out.

How religious norms of gender, sexuality, and the body relate to ‘secular’ perceptions and attitudes is also reflected in the contribution by Cristina Maria de Castro and Nina Rosas on “The Centrality of the Female Body in Brazilian Culture”. Using the example of Evangelicals and Muslim believers, the authors reconstruct to what extent religions in Brazil are concerned with ‘the cultivation of appearance’ against the backdrop of a neoliberal consumer culture that is obsessed with the ‘perfect body’. As the authors explain, the construction of the ideal female body is a question of lifestyle in Brazil, particularly in the upper classes. Religious actors in both selected contexts respond to this cultural frame, but critically discuss and develop distinct ‘body standards’. While Muslims denounce the commercialisation of the body, Evangelicals advocate the concept of care for the body, which is mirrored by religious patterns of self-regulation and purification. These case studies also demonstrate how religions respond to socio-cultural expectations, rather than vice versa.

While the contribution by Castro and Rosas highlights the effects of secular–capitalist norms on religious contexts, Karen Hooge Michalka and Mary Ellen Konieczny reconstruct in “The Continuance of Gender Culture amid Change in Mexican-American Immigrant Catholic Contexts” how gender cultures of machismo and marianismo shape Catholic teachings about marital relations and sexuality in Latino immigrant communities in the United States. In this regard, the Catholic priests play a decisive role; according to the authors’ findings, they strongly relied on masculine authority, but used it in order to influence Latino men who are privileged, given women’s subordination und control of their sexuality. The priests seized on a specific gender-egalitarian concept in the US American context that privileges equal sharing between women and men. Michalka and Konieczny explain this as an intersection of diverse gender beliefs in a particular local religious context.

In a timely study on experiences of lay women working in the Polish Catholic church, Katarzyna Leszczynka implicitly reflects on the solidification of a specifically exclusive type of hegemonic masculinity.¹⁴ In her contribution “Between Womanhood as Ideal and Womanhood as a Social Practice”, Leszczynka shows how the church women sacralise their problematic experiences of subordination in the highly androcentric church structures, in order to make sense of their problematic situation. The experience of being symbolically categorised in the religious system according to an image of femininity that is based on women’s alleged emotionality, relationality, and a readiness to unchallenged devotion has to be reconciled every day anew with an often experienced lack of respect and acknowledgement by the male clergy. Additionally, women’s commitment is inhibited by the church’s strict vertical segregation in which lay people have a secondary status anyway. Astonishingly, the women share essentialist notions of femininity but, on the level of everyday practice, they nevertheless ‘clash with the world of the priests’, as one of Leszczynka’s interviewees explained. Accordingly, the women carry a threefold burden: next to the double burden of work and private life, they have to bear the traditional image of womanhood which is regarded as ‘sacred’.

In contrast, Bindi Shah shows in her article on “South-Asian Religious Practices in the Context of Migration” that the religious conduct of upper-class Jain women and men in Britain and the US converges. Shah identifies the religious field as an important site for the negotiation of gender identities. In this regard, it is important not only that the Jain tradition is a non-institutionalised religion, but also that the migration context plays a significant role. Both conditions enable women and men, according to Shah’s findings, the development of multiple masculinities and femininities. Theoretically, Shah draws on a micro-perspective of lived religious practice in contrast to normative notions of Jain dharma. While Jain religious practice is actually strongly gendered in India and follows the hierarchical order of Jain ascetics, living the dharma in migration contexts shifts the attention away from the authority of rituals towards the religious actors’ individual capacities and spiritual insight through their own efforts. This finally also leads to a critical engagement with dominant neo-liberal facets of masculinity and femininity.

Finally, Jörg Stolz and Christophe Monnot examine “Female Religious Leadership in Switzerland”. Their findings demonstrate once more—similar to Leszczynka’s results—that the main elements that hinder or allow for women’s participation in religious contexts are theological legitimations and rules. The ‘sorts’ of barriers depend on the particular religious traditions, but in general the symbolisation of the gender order—in particular of womanhood and femininity in this case—is the main cause for women’s social positioning in religions. As a consequence, the authors emphasise that a religion’s position on female leadership is still one of the most salient markers of the progressive–conservative divide across the religious spectrum.

All the contributions in this special issue demonstrate that religion(s), gender beliefs in religion(s), and the social practices of religious actors vary according to social context, time, and place. They trace gender differences across varying religious cultures and reconstruct how these differences are shaped by religious cultures. In this perspective, religion is discernible as a social ‘variable’ that is contingent on ‘culture’; in other words, religion is a social sphere that mirrors socio-cultural beliefs and (gender) codes like any other social field. With this in mind, the special issue on Religious Cultures and Gender Cultures cordially invites all readers to a differentiated engagement with gender differences across religious cultures.

Acknowledgments

The editors of this special section (the author of this introduction and Elisabeth Arweck) would like to thank all the authors for their contributions and for their patience during the peer review process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heidemarie Winkel

Heidemarie Winkel is professor of sociology at Bielefeld University and Senior Research Associate at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender and sociology of religion with a particular interest in (transcultural) knowledge production, also in Arab societies. Recent publications include “Global Historical Sociology and Connected Gender Sociologies: On the Re-Nationalization and Coloniality of Gender” in InterDisciplines (2018) and “Religion, Orientalism and the Colonial Body of Gender Knowledge” in Religion in Context: Handbook (co-edited with Annette Schnabel and Melanie Reddig 2018).

Notes

1. In Anglo-American contexts, for example, it seems to be much more natural to understand gender theoretical approaches as feminist, while feminist perspectives are disputed in other contexts such as in religious research in Germany.

2. For a discussion of transcultural perspectives in cultural gender studies, see Mae and Saal 2014.

3. This is embedded in a longstanding history of ‘othering’ Islam. Postcolonial theorists Ramon Grosfoguel and Eric Mielants argue that religion was the first marker of otherness in the modern/colonial world system of the fifteenth century (Grosfoguel and Mielants 2006).

4. To what extent this is accompanied by the reproduction of colonial knowledge patterns, for example, when Muslims are treated as ‘a matter of security’, is discussed in more detail in Winkel 2018a.

5. The quote is translated from the German original by the author.

6. For a discussion of the term Leitkultur, see e.g. Esser 2004.

7. Following Stuart Hall (1994) and Etienne Balibar (1992), this is a paradigmatic example of cultural racism.

8. The quote is translated from the German original by the author.

9. Matthias Koenig and Jean-Paul Willaime’s (2008) collection demonstrates that the history of religious controversies is mirrored in present disputes, for example, disputes about religious education in schools or the so-called headscarf debates. Stephan Moebius (2011) reconstructs to what extent early sociologists were involved in the discoursivation of religion–state relations around 1900, taking the Durkheim school as a paradigmatic example. Discoursivation is a well-known concept (following Foucault) in e.g. social sciences and literary studies.

10. According to Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann (1984, 333), social reality consists of various provinces of meaning “that transcend the finite province of meaning of everyday life”.

11. An instructive overview of pluralisation is provided by Pickel, Yendell, and Jaeckel (2017).

12. Göle (2008, 51) understands the public visibility of Muslims as an individual appropriation of Islam and as an expression of civil engagement in the pluralistic frame of European public spaces, in contrast to the approach of their parents’ generations. She adds that the turn towards religion confirms an identity that is ascribed by the host societies anyway.

13. A controversial debate about ‘Arab sexism’ and the category of young ‘sexually aggressive Muslim men’ popped up in Cologne after New Year’s Eve in 2015. See e.g. Kersten 2016 on this subject.

14. My understanding of exclusive masculinity is developed in Winkel 2019.