Chapter 6: The Social Foundations of the Sacred: Feminists and the Politics of Religion

Bronwyn Winter

The social foundations of the sacred: Feminists and the politics of religion This chapter looks at religion as a sociocultural, political, economic, and historical phenomenon, rather than as a personal question of faith or notions of transcendence, the sacred, the taboo, or the divine. In other words, it looks at religion as constitutive of social organization and power relations and the codification thereof, and as such, as central to the collective and individual internalization of cultural identity. It gives a broad overview of the late twentieth-century development of Western and non-Western feminist study and critiques of religion, then looks at some contemporary debates that cut across different religions - the question of interpretation and authenticity, secularism and atheism, the search for spirituality, and lesbians and religion - as well as at the particular case of the Islamic headscarf as a marker of gender, ethnic, and religious identity in a post-9/11 ...

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