Home Annual Meeting Call for Papers Groups Men, Masculinities, and Religions
January 2013

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Call for Proposals

This Group invites proposals on the following topics:

  • Soldiers, masculinities, and moral injuries. Moral Injury is an ancient wound of war, aggravated by current conditions experienced by returning Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. Unlike PTSD, moral injury is the internalized ethical and spiritual conflict that persists as a response to a violation of conscience brought on by the morally-compromising reality of war. In the context of our meeting in Maryland, with its national V.A. Hospitals, we seek papers that will reveal more clearly the conditions known as moral injury through artistic or ethnographic description of the impact of moral injury on men’s lives, that will provide a critical analysis of the meaning and/or treatment of moral injury of military veterans, that expose the unrevealed injury that violations of conscience visits upon the families and/or communities of veterans where the warrior self defies the existence of moral injury, or that interpret the definition or meaning of moral injury through critical theological or faith tradition analysis

  • For a possible cosponsored session with the Religion, Affect, and Emotion Group, masculinities and religious affects. Feminist theorists have pointed out that the history of Western thought has tended to divide the sexes using affect — where women have been seen by many religious traditions as passionate and emotional, men have been aligned with reason and lucidity. These correspondences have had a major impact on religion — for instance by underpinning male claims to religious authority. Affect theory suggests, however, that we not only take apart these constructions, but look at the hidden affects that go into their production. This session will explore the affects of religious masculinity. Papers might consider questions like: What are the emotions that compose masculine religious identities? What male-gendered bodily practices go into the cultivation of particular affective textures? How are masculinities regulated using emotional expectations and practices? How do religious traditions challenge or reconstitute masculinities using affect? We would like the full text of accepted papers available for circulation beginning November 1, 2013

  • For a cosponsored session with the Feminist Theory and Religious Reflection Group, feminist theories and critical turns — continuities and departures. What do we mean by feminist theory today? How do we enact religious feminist theorizations in a global setting? What continuities and departures are imaginable and/or necessary? When feminist theory encountered the fields of religious studies and theology, it confronted one of the greatest conceptual and pragmatic minefields possible — the authorial “God,” the absence of women in positions of spiritual authority, the apparent marginalized status of women in many traditions, and the devotional persistence of religious meanings in women’s participation. As feminist theorists applied themselves to the tasks of incorporating women’s genealogies, centering on women’s experience and addressing the androcentric biases of the field, they created monumental changes in the field. Furthermore, assuming religious traditions themselves were concerned with transformation, feminist theory’s concern with recovering and examining experience found a home in this nexus of transformation — bringing into relief crucial ideas, topics, and methodologies that reconstituted what the rigorous study of religions should entail. Scholars have responded, opening innovative and important conceptual spaces where one can theorize lived experience and affirm the presence of otherness. Acknowledging our themes of continuity and departure, we seek papers that highlight this genealogy of feminist theorizations, activism, and strategic moves, taking into account our complex global setting:

    • Promoting social justice through expanded visions (different conceptions of self, society, others, etc.)

    • Recovering genealogies — tradition and theory

    • Feminist theory after the critical gender turn

    • Nonautonomous models of agency

    • Interreligious dialogue, conflict, and alliance-building

    • Strategies for women’s safety in patriarchal traditions

    • Jettisoning Good Old God — what do you mean He’s patriarchal?

    • War, terrorism in the name of God, and the absence/presence of women’s peace work

    • Protective patriarchies in the twenty-first century and women’s responses

    • Indigenous perspectives on gender and Mother Earth

    • Biotechnologies and reproduction in the twenty-first century — is nothing sacred?

    • Cyborgs

    • Harbors of feminist theory

    • Why I’m not a feminist (in public/ever)

    • How the Atlantic charges feminist theory

    • The status of women’s religious leadership in a global context

    • Objectification/Self-objectification — have Hooters and protective patriarchy won?

Mission

This Group provides a forum within which the phenomenon of masculine gendered identity is examined using the range of methodologies found in the broad fields of theology and religious studies. This Group engages in the critical study of men and the performance of masculinities in culturally specific settings.

Anonymity of Review Process

Proposer names are visible to Chairs but anonymous to Steering Committee members.

Questions?

Robert A. Atkins
Grace United Methodist Church, Naperville, IL
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Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher
Texas College
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Method of Submission

 

This website contains archived issues of Religious Studies News published online from March 2010 to May 2013, and PDF versions of print editions published from Winter 2001 to October 2009.

This site also contains archived issues of Spotlight on Teaching (May 1999 to May 2013) and Spotlight on Theological Education (March 2007 to March 2013).

For current issues of RSN, beginning with the October 2013 issue, please see here.


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