Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Unit
For the 2024 November meeting, we seek proposals related to the purpose of our unit with attention to two specific themes:
For a possible co-sponsorship with Religion and Food, we welcome papers on the sexual and religious politics of meat, food porn, food as resilience and nourishment in the face of violence and marginalization, and food in relation to embodied humans and an embodied ecological Earth.
For a possible co-sponsorship with Contemporary Pagan Studies, we welcome descriptive or theoretical approaches to witches and the occult on social media Tik Tok, Instagram, Facebook, and beyond), including how social media is changing ways of making meaning, authority and gender, cultural appropriation, connections to politics, aesthetics, consumerism, and forming community.
We are also planning an author-meets-respondents session, co-sponsored with Afro-American Religious History, on Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South with Laura McTighe and Deon Haywood focusing on the themes of social organizing, Black feminist liberation, collaborative scholarship, ethnography, the context of the American South, or other facets relating to Fire Dreams. Please email Annie Blazer (alblazer@wm.edu) if you would like to be considered as a respondent.
This Unit has consistently provided programmatic space for a wide variety of feminist theories, including feminist theology, queer theory, continental feminist theory, feminist political theory, etc., as these intersect with a broad understanding of “religious reflection”, including institutional religious settings, or intersections of religion and culture, religion and aesthetics, religion and the body, and religion and nature. As the 21 century commences, FTRR will plan to invigorate feminist analyses of religious discourse within a global setting. Urgent concerns include forms of religious violence and climate crises, among others.