The Intricate Nexus Between Gender, Religion, and Education

• In Event: Women’s Religious Identity Formation in Educational Contexts

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to enhance an interdisciplinary discourse on the complex interrelations between gender, religion and education in today’s world. The immense changes in terms of globalization and migration of peoples have had a profound effect on cultures and identities. Does this result in shifts in religious identities for women and men in different contexts; can such shifts be viewed as beneficial, negative or insufficient; or does the social change take the direction of new conservatism or fundamentalism? Related to these questions is the role of education in any change.
This paper primarily explores gender through the perspective of women, although there are also analyses of masculinities and shifts in, or reassertions of, patriarchy. The paper challenges assumptions about women in religion and the role of women in theology. There is often emphasis on female subordination within a religion, which raises questions of why women remain religious adherents and what can be empowering. Literature in the social sciences and humanities have expanded our understanding of women’s involvement in almost every aspect of life, yet the combined religious/educational aspect is still an under-studied and often under-theorized field of research. How people experience their religious identity in a new context or country is also a theme that calls for more complex treatment today.
The paper engages with the pivotal transformations that studies of gender, religion and education have undergone in recent years. It deals with the complexity of the ties between gender, religion, and education and the internal complexity of each of those components. It shows that today we should not talk about gender, but genders, not about a religious identity, but religious identities, and not about education, but educations. The pluralization process; that is, the transition from one to many of these three concepts, does not indicate a quantitative transition but rather a qualitative-substantive change in the inner patterns and dynamics that have taken place in all three. The interconnection between them creates a new idiosyncratic nature that requires a different form of research and observation than what we are accustomed to.
Gender studies have undergone a material change, from gender to intersectionality. Research into religiosity has gone through far-reaching changes from the monotheist, one-dimensional approach, to a multidimensional approach that allows us to engage with definitional-religious nuances that were not previously addressed. The sphere of pedagogy and education has also undergone a significant change, from functional structured instrumental pedagogy to reflective pedagogy. These changes are illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The interrelationships between gender, religion and education

The three changes can be heard in the distinctive voices of religious women who live between tradition and modernity. Most of those women are not only modern women or only religious women, but modern religious women coping bravely with – and within – a complex liminal reality that creates a branched and complex space which Homi Bhabha (1990) called the “third space.”

Author

• Zehavit Gross, Bar-Ilan University