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Gender and World Religions + Witch Hunts - Coggle Diagram
Gender and World Religions +
Witch Hunts
Gender and World Religions
Ursula King
: major world religions, but also beliefs and practices of ancient times and new religious phenomena.
Spirituality or faith are sometimes synonymous, but sometimes distinct from religion
Definitions of religions are often western-centric.
features:
address/answer big questions of human existence
Provide symbolic systems
Symbols, myths, metaphors conveyed through texts and oral traditions
Ritual, sacred places or objects
communal/individualised
Not monolithic, but syncretic
sex, gender and religion
In most religious systems, sex and gender are treated the same
Reform in gender roles does not mean a critique of sex/gender conflation.
Often marked by essentialism/dualisms/binaries
Ursula King: religions have created and legitimated gender, enforced, oppressed and warped it, but subverted, transgressed, transformed and liberated it.
Lisbeth Mikaelsson: in the shape of symbols and mythical systems, religion construes the nature of the world, humanities place in it, how life should be lived according to divine will, and what it is to be a man or a woman.
religion and patriarchy
Patriarch is a religious word > male power structures/leaders
Influential texts and teachings are done almost exclusively by men
Modern fundamentalisms are very patriarchal
Globally, women are more likely to identify with a religious faith, but this is changing and there are variations to be aware of > Pew Research Centre Sutyd 2010
Women are not universally more religious than men
Women who participate in the labour force tend to show lower levels of religious commitment than women who do not work outside of the home for pay
Among Christians, women attend religious services more often, but among women and orthodox Jews men attend more
More women pray daily than men
Muslim men and women are more alike in their religiousness compared to Christian men and women
historic appeal of religion to women
Wide-ranging- lots of different levels of engagement
Becoming a nun to escape childbirth in a time when childbirth was dangerous
Access to education and travel where otherwise not available
Spiritualism as a form of eroticism
More rights and mode of politics
The appeal of figures like Muhammad or jesus > friendly to women.
does religion oppress or empower women?
Too broad of a question to do justice to religious complexity
Hindu contexts help women assert their rights and identities and contexts where Hindu ideals of womanhood constrain and subordinate women to their husbands
In more communal societies where women may lack independent income to purchase freedom and autonomy may be considered neither desirable or desired
Religions often stress and provide freedom via interdependence rather than autonomy.
Western women have rejected religion to the point where they become deaf to the experiences of those who are religious, and some women are so multicultural that they stay silent when cultures oppress women in the name of religion.
gender and hinduism
The feminine in traditional India is define more positively in its own right (shakti)
Different starting point for Indian misogyny: feminine as terrifying and powerful otherness (eg Goddess Kali)
Conceptions of gender are often filtered thought caste (jati) as an organising principle of the multiplicity and diversity within Indian society
Unique nature of Hinduism: still polytheistic and has goddesses.
Goddesses as both benign and loving, but also fearsome and terrifying, capable of protecting devotees.
Women has having power but not authority; their power needing to be harnessed, controlled, or appropriated by men.
Representative of an emphasis on diversity and plurality in Indian society.
emergence of buddhism
Arose in India 6th century BCE
In opposition to, but also in dialogue with Hinduism.
Gender ambivalence > co-existence in Buddhism of love/hate for women OR a blurring of gender boundaries
central points
No one orthodoxy imposed/enforced by any one institution
Like other world religions, the Buddhist order was male-dominated and it did exhibit misogyny at times.
Hinayana: difficult path to enlightenment (mainly restricted to clerics/monks)
Mahayana: seen as more egalitarian because salvation is open to all.
Sought to bring Buddhism’s message to all people, offering easier paths to religious salvation, including for, to varying extents in different sects, to women.
New emphasis on certain buddhas and bodhisattvas as saviours (not just the founder of Buddhism, Gautama)
Some schools were/are entirely focused on Amida Buddha, who made a separate vow to save women.
Buddhism did not set down patriarchal rules for ordinary followers
Doctrinally, Buddhism opposes dualism (conceptual opposites set up between things/people) > misogyny is contradictory rather than inherent
Monotheisms vs Buddhism
Monotheism:
One central canon/orthodoxy (the Bible)
More centralised
One father and creator God
God, the absolute opposite of humans
Central emphasis on sin
Salvation, to live on, as oneself.
judaism
First of the major (surviving) monotheisms
Judaism (a more hierarchical religion than hitherto) said to have arisen around 900 BCE
Part of shift to agricultural societies
From the Hebrew Bible and the Torah: emphasis on patriarchal lineage as a source of identity
Often women in good/bad pairs > one vs the other.
Gender and sex in early Judaism:
Strong emphasis on keeping tradition and identity alive
Marriage and family law favoured men (eg right to divorce) but men had obligations
Rituals and regulations were weighted against women
Sexual pleasure was important (sometimes)
christianity
From Judaism, Christians retained Jewish beliefs about the acceptability of some practices and not others; Genesis
From Greco-Romans: extended minor strains, eg Ascetism
Aspects of Plato’s dualistic philosophy and Aristotles ‘scientific proofs’ of womens inherent inferiority.
Creation, the Fall, and the Garden of Eden
An origin of patriarchy myth
Eve as the women > subordinate, temptress, disruptive
Adam as the man > is alienated and condemned due to entanglement with women.
Feminist critiques of Christianity > the scriptures written by men, the Christian trinity is gendered masculine
Historical evidence of persecution and exclusion
Feminist critiques of engagements with religion
Critique religious studies, identify and eliminate ‘distorting lenses of gender’, do not leave masculinity unexamined.
protestant reformation
Sex was an integral part
Rejected celibacy and perched sex within marriage as vital to domestic harmony
Female convents shut down, but centrality of the Bible encouraged female education
Emphasis on exclusively masculinist God > rejection of Mary, witch hunts, etc.
Witch Hunts
No comparable phenomena elsewhere
Witch-hunts evidence of a shift in religious thought
Concern about witches varied according to class location
Stereotypes about witches predated this period and endured throughout
There was no one stereotype of the European witch, and even within specific locations witches did not conform to a single social profile
The absence of any clear sense of the identity of witches was reflected in the many different ways in which the crime of witchcraft was defined
It was considered unthinkable that some witches could be male
europe 1500-1800
~1400 (before witch trials started)-1750 (when most ended)
Major religious wars taking place > protestant reformation, catholic reformation, spanish inquisition
Sexual behaviour of both the commonfolk and the clergy was a big feature of both Protestantism and catholicism
Catholics and protestants amped up social disciplinary aspects of religion
Key difference: place of sexual desire in marriage
ALL sexuality outside of marriage was marked as more deviant than ever before > prostitution, homosexuality, etc.
Approx 100,00 people in europe and colonial america were prosecuted between 1400-1775 with approx 50,000 executed
Overall, 70-85% were women > figures vary across regions
The popular idea of the witch shifted in this period
patterns and variations
15th century: fewer and more sporadic; notions of diabolical witchcraft first developed
Lausanne paradigm > witchcraft as a new kind of heresy
Geography was a factor, but this argument has changed over time > urban vs rural
France
: crime judged in secular rather than ecclesiastical courts
Demonology theory was very important
More men were accused in france compared to elsewhere.
Scotland
: one of the most severe hunts in protestant europe; 85% accused were women mostly over 40.
Extramarital sex was a big issue > female witches were often depicted as having sex with the devil, but male witches were never.
German lands
- “heartland of the witch-craze” esp in 1590-1630. Period of chain-reaction hunts.
Was at the front line of religious wars
Distinctive feature: familiar stereotypes broke down and more men were accused, though at the height of the trials 80% of those accused were women mostly over 40.
Nordic countries
had considerable variations; sweden primarily target women, whereas iceland primarily targeted men.
why were the overall majority women?
Alison Rowland: gender shaped every aspect of early modern witchcraft and witch trials… statistics on the numbers of men and women tried should be the starting point, not the conclusion of analysis.
From the 16th century, images of mary’s breasts go out of style, and breasts become a strong feature of witch imagery > hags who are depicted as envious young fertile women.
Witches were represented as women, highly sexualised, often in highly misogynistic terms, and the opposite of acceptable/desirable femininity.
Lyndal Roper encourages analysis of the witch craze as an embodied and psychic phenomenon that was enacted/ articulated in highly sexualised terms:
‘There is certainly a sexual undertow in this imagination. It is no coincidence that exorcisms took place on beds, nor that the spectacle involved women rolling around on the ground, her dress askew and her shame uncovered’ (p. 25).
shifting interpretations
Earlier historical investigations were to focused on religion
Women’s historians/radical feminists encountered gender-blind reading with some of their own emphases > witches were healers and midwives, etc.
Witches embodied everything “that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeaha woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt” (Silvia Ferderici pg 11)