Women’s Health and Religion

This roundtable explores religion and women’s health in the modern world, addressing an important gap in the scholarship at the intersection of religious studies and the growing field of health humanities. Inspired by feminist epistemologies of “partial perspectives” (Haraway 1988, 1997), Claire Wendland’s Partial Stories: Maternal Death from Six Angles (2022) brings together narratives about maternal mortality to reveal how knowledge and meaning are made across a range of traditions and forms of expertise. Though the scholars that will take part in this discussion do not work on the same material, our imperfect analog to Wendland’s approach nonetheless allows us to draw out how knowledge and meaning about “women,” “religion,” “health,” and “modernity” are constituted. What do the stories we tell through our research share? What do they occlude? What kinds of moral claims are we, as scholars of religion, producing or legitimating through our methodological and theoretical choices?