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Gender & Religion Research Centre Seminar Department of the Study of Religions, SOAS Rm 336, 13:00-14:30 Friday, 2nd February 2001 Feminist Methodologies in the Study of Religion Sian Hawthorne, SOAS Methodology has been a preoccupation and closely contested area in the discipline of the study of religions since its relatively recent introduction to the Academy. The excellent and timely work of Ursula King et al. (Religion and Gender, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 1995,) in proposing a gender-sensitive and feminist hermeneutic as a crucial critique to the champions of phenomenology and Eliadean sui generis typology, has indicated the possibility, and indeed, necessity, for a paradigm shift in scholarly approaches to religious traditions and phenomena. In so doing, one of the stated aims of this new methodology is to reconceptualise power as integral to religion and its study in order to generate conceptual change and renewal (King 1995:73). In addition, King adopts Sandra Lipsitz Bem’s ‘lenses of gender’ (gender polarisation, androcentrism and biological essentialism) to argue for a critical investigation of ‘gender formation and gender relations’ (1995:10) in religious traditions and the institutions of those who study them. This investigation aims requires a profound transformation in existing methodologies and epistemological commitments but walks a tightrope between the feminist project of political change and the postmodern challenge of deconstruction. This paper will examine this tension, considering briefly the variety of feminist methodologies open to students of religion, and suggesting the neglected work of Julia Kristeva as a possibly fruitful area for further methodological progress. Sian Hawthorne is a research student in the Department of the Study of Religions at SOAS. Her thesis concerns the cultural strategies embedded in goddess and serpent mythologies, applying a feminist epistemology. Her research interests lie generally in the areas of post-structural French feminisms, semiotics, the Philosophy of Religion and approaches to mythology. _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.