Bodily Citations: Religion and Judith Butler

Gender, Theory, and Religion

by Ellen T. Armour (Editor), Susan M. St. Ville (Editor), Amy Hollywood (Contributor)

In such works as Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter Judith Butler broke new ground in understanding the construction and performance of identities. While Butler's writings have been crucial and often controversial in the development of feminist and queer theory, Bodily Citations is the first anthology centered on applying her theories to religion. In this collection scholars in anthropology, biblical studies, theology, ethics, and ritual studies use Butler's work to investigate a variety of topics in biblical, Islamic, Buddhist, and Christian traditions. The authors shed new light on Butler's ideas and highlight their ethical and political import. They also broaden the scope of religious studies as they bring it into conversation with feminist and queer theory.

Subjects discussed include the woman's mosque movement in Cairo, the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the possibility of queer ethics, religious ritual, and biblical constructions of sexuality.

Contributors include: Karen Trimble Alliaume, Lewis University; Teresa Hornsby, Drury University; Amy Hollywood, Harvard Divinity School; Christina Hutchins, Pacific School of Religion; Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley; Susanne Mrozik, Mount Holyoke College; Claudia Schippert, University of Central Florida; Rebecca Schneider, Brown University; Ken Stone, Chicago Theological Seminary

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Philosophy, Theology, Religion

336 pages, Paperback

First published July 11, 2006

About the author

Ellen T. Armour is associate professor of religious studies at Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee. She is coeditor for theology for Religious Studies Review.

(from http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/a...)

Reviews

[Mel]

Lessons learned: Not only is it hard to skim essays by Judith Butler and actually understand them, it's also hard to skim essays about Judith Butler and actually understand them. I think the most helpful thing I got from my (too rapidly skimmed--it's not you, it's me!) interaction with this book was the Butlerian fragment "gender produces sex" (vs. sex producing gender), which made sense to me in a way that illuminated Butler's theory of gender performativity a little more for me. I think.

[Ruth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not read the whole book! I got this in order to read an essay by Saba Mahmood about Egyptian women choosing to veil. It was a new take on this phenomenon: Mahmood discussed how women's religious studies classes think about modesty as a quality of character that helps a person develop submissiveness. (These terms have religious connotations with which I'm not 100% familiar. I think it's related to humility, but I'm going to try to be humble about asserting that I know more than I do!) What does this have to do with Judith Butler? Mahmood attempts to establish the idea that performance is gender, and how this fits in with women's decisions about how to engage with their physicality. (Through veiling, in this case.) I read a few more articles from the anthology: one about the woman who anoints Jesus' feet in the Gospel of Luke, one on women and ordination in Catholicism, the introduction, and Butler's own article. Butler's afterword established her connection to Judaism and to my childhood congregation in Cleveland and the rabbi there, a religion professor at Case Western Reserve University who specialized in Maimonides. He helped Butler satisfy her curiosity about philosophical topics--at 13 she wanted to know more about Spinoza. I do not understand Butler's thought most of the time, and it didn't help me that most of these articles were first, working off of her later books and second, about religions with which I'm not engaged enough. Mahmood's piece was very interesting for me though. I might take this one out of the library again just to attempt to reread Butler's afterword and take another stab at it.