Gender, Sex, and the Material Turn

The Material Turn, within and outside of the discipline of Religious Studies, is marked by a significant high interest by female and feminist scholars as well as analyses of gender, the body and aesthetics that are centred in this approach. In this paper, I will reflect upon this gendered (or sexed?) distinction with the Religious Studies’ Material Turn. This will bring new and different insights to the question in how far the Material Turn is connected to a neo-phenomenology guised in feminist (essentialising) approaches to religion and in how far this feminist approach was part of its early and ongoing appeal to the discipline. To do so, I will give an overview of the development of the Material Turn/Material Religion and how it relates to gender and sex and specifically look at the works of David Morgan and Birgit Meyer.