Gender, Genre and Religion: Feminist Reflections

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Religious studies have been largely patriarchal for a very long time.
Canadian women researchers in the field, however, have formed a network
and are working to correct the bias. This collection of essays, which
covers most of the major religions, suggests how religious traditions
will change as women assume more active and central roles. Editors Morny
Joy, an associate professor of Religious Studies at the University of
Calgary, and Eva Neumaier-Dargyay, a specialist in Tibetan and Indian
Languages and Literatures with a focus on feminist and psychoanalytical
perspectives at the University of Alberta, provide brief summaries of
the 16 essays on genre and gendered perspectives.

Joy’s witty closing essay “And What If Truth Were a Woman?” plays
with Nietzsche’s preface to Beyond Good and Evil and Derrida’s
exploitation of Nietzsche’s figure of a woman (Nietzsche begins by
“supposing that Truth is a Woman”). Her conclusion—“God-talk
does not occur in a vacuum” but rather mirrors the hopes, visions, and
fears of particular eras—sums up the collection. Gender, Genre and
Religion will interest serious thinkers and religious scholars.