Multiple religiosities, entangled modernities und Geschlecht: was ist anders an verschiedenen religiösen Geschlechterkulturen?

Abstract

Religion is introduced in this article as a social sphere that mirrors and addresses basic cultural gender codes just like any other social field. Taking this perspective, religion is understood to be part of the social life-world that is structured by a commonly shared system of social categorisations and typifications. Consequently, religious agents experience and act in the religious sphere according to these general patterns of cultural meaning as they do in any other part of their life-world. Against this backdrop, the worldwide plurality of religious gender sociality can be approached in a distinct way. Accordingly, this article focuses on a select theoretical approach: Following Shmuel Eisenstadt's multiple modernities paradigm I conceive the plurality of religious gender cultures as an expression of multiple religiosities that are embedded within diverse structural and institutional environments. The key theoretical dimension of this approach is the social fabric of basic cultural codes. The central questions are: to what extent does the multiple modernities perspective facilitate a gender-conscious approach to cultural comparisons and how can we conceive of multiple religiosities as gendered social realities? These questions affect epistemological considerations of how contextually contingent historical experiences and cultural backgrounds can be theoretically considered. Empirically, I refer to select discourses of gender relations in Arab-Muslim societies against the backdrop of European bourgeois gender philosophies that are based on dimorphism. In addition, Islamic feminism is considered as a third example of multiple gendered religiosities. Keywords

The social dynamics of religion in the public domain

“…Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchard (2012) offer the concept of multiple secularities to explain the multiple forms of boundary making towards religion, in as well as beyond Europe. Winkel (2017a) suggests instead to conceive the variety of religious reality as multiple religions consisting of different structural, institutional and symbolic configurations allowing for a deeper understanding of social continuity and persistence, for example, in terms of conservative or fundamental expressions in the realm of gender relations. Berger's (2014) 'many altars of modernity' range from relativistic to fundamentalist forms of religion, each with their own challenges to so-called 'secular' states.…”

Religious cultures and gender cultures: tracing gender differences across religious cultures

“…As Hubert Knoblauch (1999, 12) emphasises with reference to Alfred Schütz (1962, 335), the "symbolic forms, however, in which elements of other realities are appresented 'are as manifold as the symbols appresenting them'". As a result, Western European societies, for example, develop particular-not universal-forms of symbolic universes, whether in terms of 'gender' or 'religion' (Winkel 2012;Winkel 2017). This approach reveals that culturalist conceptions of both 'religion' and 'gender' have specific social meanings as meaningful signs in the symbolic order of "secular modernity" (Kröhnert-Othmann 2014), namely as categories and markers of identity-and alterity-that allow for symbolic boundary-making.…”