White Epistemology, The Cultural Trauma of the Religious Right, and Feminist Sociology

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18. Religion and Social Change

Abstract

Why has feminist sociology, historically and contemporarily, ignored or rejected the call for the inclusion of religious or spiritual identity into our matrices of intersecting identities? Why does the idea persist that feminism and religious expression or adherence cannot coexist? I argue that a combination of white epistemology and the cultural trauma of the U.S. Religious Right have rendered public understandings of religious adherence as inherently conservative and Christian. This paper seeks to outline the contours of this political history and explore the implications for feminist scholarship. First, I offer a brief historical overview of the ways that feminist scholarship has been siloed from scholarship that attends to religion. Then, I theorize about why this cleavage has persisted contemporarily. Finally, I offer feminist sociologists various paths forward and suggest opportunities to include and attend to religion in nuanced and feminist ways in our scholarship.

Author

• Amanda Dawn Hernandez, Southwestern University