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16 Days of Activism – Day 16: Beatrice Lawrence

by Beatrice Lawrence on

To mark the final day of UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism campaign, we profile Beatrice Lawrence, an Assistant Professor at Seattle University. Beatrice works closely with fellow academic activists Rhiannon Graybill and Meredith Minister on religion and gender-based violence. Look out for their forthcoming edited volume Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (Lexington Books).

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

I’m an assistant professor at Seattle University, where I teach courses on the Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies, often cross-listed with Women and Gender Studies. I love my job; I think the material at the heart of my career is fascinating and important, and it’s wonderful to see students realize that as well. My research is eclectic, ranging from rabbinics to rape culture. A consistent thread, however, is that of pushing boundaries.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?

 I grew up in a staunchly feminist household. My mother was an activist, going on marches and serving as the president of Idaho’s National Organization for Women. (Yes. Idaho.) She would take us with her, she would talk about it with us, and my father was just as engaged. Feminism was and is an integrated and central element of our family dialect, and I’m incredibly grateful: I have always been motivated to see and name gender-based injustice and violence. It is only natural that it would be a part of my work, and the way I parent my daughters.

I’ve always been involved in community and pedagogical work around sexual assault, by creating workshops, engaging in mindful teaching practices, and supporting activist groups. But a few years ago, I was blessed to meet my colleagues and friends, Rhiannon Graybill and Meredith Minister, at a Wabash workshop. We came to realize we shared a concern about sexual assault on college campuses, as well as the conviction that the culture surrounding it needed to be identified and named. Its intersection with our work in Bible and theology fueled our desire to create sophisticated yet accessible means to discuss it. Thus was born our work together, writing and teaching about rape culture.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

 I’m grateful for the chance to connect with the wonderful people at The Shiloh Project to mutually promote each other’s work. We share a commitment to relevant, rigorous scholarship on gender-based inequality and violence, and a desire to have an impact in the academy as well as outside it. We are publishing a volume on rape culture and religious studies (due out late 2018), and look forward to sharing it in this context as well. The feminist ethic of collaboration and care is present in the work of The Shiloh Project: let’s work together, support each other, and make a difference.

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?

I’m loud, angry, and active—and I plan to continue being thus.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 16: Rhiannon Graybill

by Rhiannon Graybill on

On the final day of UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism campaign, we profile Rhiannon Graybill, an Assistant Professor at Rhodes College, who works closely with fellow academic activists Beatrice Lawrence and Meredith Minister on gender-based violence. Look out for their forthcoming edited volume Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (Lexington Books).

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

My name is Rhiannon Graybill and I’m an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. At Rhodes, I am also the director of the interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies program.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?

I’m involved in gender activism in a number of ways. One of my major goals as director of Gender and Sexuality Studies is promoting scholarly work and campus awareness around gender. At Rhodes, I’ve organized events on feminism and surveillance, sexual violence on campus, and abortion activism, and I’m now working on a trans film festival event. The program also sponsors an undergraduate research symposium and a faculty scholarship group.

I’m also involved in gender activism in my research. My book, Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets is about masculinity, but to me this is always a feminist concern. Are We Not Men? uses feminist and queer theory to think about the male bodies of prophets and to understand the ways in which prophecy transforms masculinity and embodiment. My next book is a study of queer feminist readings of biblical women.

I also work specifically on sexual violence, especially in collaboration with Meredith and Beatrice. The three of us met at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, when we were part of Teaching and Learning a Workshop for Pre-Tenure Religion Faculty. We not only got along really well, but we realized we were all deeply concerned about sexual violence on campus, and working to address it in different ways. We started collaborating, beginning with a workshop for our peers at the Wabash Center and coordinating some on-campus activities (I organized a workshop for my colleagues about teaching about rape in the Bible and classical literature). Then we put together a couple of publications, one for Teaching Theology and Religion and one for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. We also organized a panel at the AAR/SBL Annual meeting in 2016. Now we’re co-editing a volume entitled Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives with Lexington Books.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

I’m so excited about The Shiloh Project! These issues are so important, and we need as many people working on them and talking about them as possible. It’s also really exciting to me to be able to be involved in international conversations around these issues, as I’m mostly familiar with the U.S. context. We have some peculiarities to our system, like the way that Title IX (the federal law about equal access in education that’s used to justify a lot of sexual violence policies) works. Thinking globally helps us gain perspective, as well as think about possible alternatives. I’m also really interested in The Shiloh Project’s work on popular culture, as well as spiritualism and transphobia. I can’t wait to see what you all produce!

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?

 This is the time to do it! Things have seemed pretty terrible on a gender front in the U.S. lately, but in a funny way I’m heartened by the outpouring of sexual harassment and assault allegations in the media and politics. I think it’s possible this might lead to some change. At the very least, people in authority are beginning to hear what we’ve been saying for decades – longer than that! I also think popular culture provides an interesting, if complicated, feminist space. I’m going to keep studying and teaching about it; I think teaching students is one great avenue for feminist activism.

Follow the links to read more of Rhiannon’s work on sexual violence:

Sexual Violence in and around the Classroom (a piece the three of us wrote for Teaching Theology and Religion).

 

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16 Days of Activism – Day 15: Dawn Llewellyn

by Dawn Llewellyn on

On Day 15, the penultimate day of the 16 Days of Activism, we talk to Dawn Llewellyn, Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies at the University of Chester.

Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?

I’m Dawn and I am Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies, in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester –  I’ve been here for 7 years since finishing my PhD in Religious Studies at Lancaster in 2010. I teach and supervise in the areas of gender and religion, sociology of religion, gender studies, and qualitative methodologies and methods. My work is grounded in feminist qualitative approaches to the study of gender and Christianity: I’ve researched women’s religious reading practices and cultures in relation to literature and the Bible; I’ve also written on feminist generations, third wave feminism, the wave metaphor, and the disciplinary disconnections between feminist/women’s/gender studies and religion.

I’m currently examining women’s reproductive agency in Christianity. In particular, my research focuses on women’s  narratives of choice toward motherhood or elective childlessness, and how women mediate and experience the pronatalism circulating through doctrine, scriptures, teachings and the everyday social practices of church life (no surprise, there’s *quite* a lot of pronatalism for women to mediate).

What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?

I was delighted and honoured to be asked to become a member when the Shiloh project began. It’s such an important conversation that Katie, Johanna, and Caroline and the team have brought to the fore because religious discourses do inscribe and re-inscribe the inequalities underlying gendered violence and rape culture.

At the moment, I’m very good at tweeting and retweeting about the Shiloh Project and SIIBS, and I have promised to write a piece for the blog! I’m really excited to be part of the work the Project is doing and will do.

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?

As a feminist researcher in religious studies, I try in my teaching and research to analyse the ways religion, particularly Christianity, generates gendered injustice, and in particular, how women  mediate and negotiate patriarchal and androcentric religious structures. In my previous project, I interviewed Christian and ‘post’ Christian women about the literatures that inspired and resourced their faith and spiritual identities. In the interviews, the women also discussed their biblical reading practices and disclosed their anger at the passages they understood to valorize violence against women.  For some participants, this meant they left Christianity or at least turned to women’s writing as a substitute for the Bible – unable to read texts or belong to a tradition that sacralizes narratives that demean women. For others, they resist and reject the text they found problematic. Interrogating how women engage with the biblical texts, and Christian teachings, doctrines and practices is central to my research and teaching.

 How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today? 

Rape culture and ideology can be insidious; that’s part of its power. One way to dismantle its power and the shame and guilt it perpetuates is to name it, as we saw with #MeToo. During that campaign, I was really struck, moved, and enraged by the shared stories of my friends and colleagues who had experienced harassment in academia: at conferences, in meetings, when travelling, and at University or departmental social events. It was also painful to see how many social media posts by women about #MeToo started with a line or two saying that they didn’t think what they’d experienced was ‘serious’ enough to warrant mentioning; and the media backlash against those testimonies reveals, again, the prominence of gendered violence and its acceptance.  In a secularizing society like the UK, in which religion has lost some of its influence for individuals, communities and institutions, it is too easy and simplex to think that religion no longer shapes cultural norms. The work that the Shiloh Project does – the blogs, the lectures, the projects, the seminars, the research – is important research that uncovers religion’s role in constructing and supporting rape culture.

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

The project’s themes and aims are helping me think more critically about motherhood and rape culture. Just as Christianity’s essentialist ideas about women’s bodies limit their roles to the maternal, essentialist ideas underpin sexual domination and violence. Generally, though, I’m looking forward to potential joint projects and questions that are already emerging, to being part of a such a fantastic initiative, and learning with and from such a fantastic bunch of scholars.

And I really need to write my blog piece…

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16 Days of Activism – Day 14: Vanita Sundaram

by Vanita Sundaram on

Vanita Sundaram, Professor of Education at the University of York talks to us about her work on sexual violence in educational contexts.

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

My name is Vanita Sundaram and I am a Professor of Education at the University of York, working on gender-related harassment and violence across the education lifecourse.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?

 My work is increasingly applied in its focus, as I seek to use the fundamental and theoretical knowledge we have about gender-related harassment and violence among children, young people and young adults, to inform prevention and intervention work in educational settings. I have used my work to develop critical consciousness-raising clubs about gendered and sexual pressures facing young people in secondary school, as well as working with local survivor organisations to develop educational programmes about sexual violence for university settings. I am interested not only in the causes of gender-related harassment and violence and the multiple ways in which children and young people encounter such practices, but in working with children and young people themselves to develop educational interventions which can challenge the values, attitudes and cultures which allow such behaviours to flourish in educational settings. Part of this endeavour involves engaging young people with gender activism, with making visible the gender and sexual norms that govern and shape their identities, expectations and practices in and outside of school.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

I am hugely excited to be involved with the Shiloh Project. The focus on rape culture in/and religious imagery, and the myriad of ways in which this is produced and sustained through popular culture is immediately relevant to my own work on young people’s experiences of gender-related violence. Popular culture is one of many interfaces through which young people’s understandings and expectations of gender and sexuality is negotiated, including in relation to representations of harassment and violence. Together with the Directors of the Shiloh Project, we are developing work on young people’s interactions with representations of violence in religious imagery used in popular culture. I am particularly excited by the intersectional approach we will take in understanding how particular notions of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality are produced through religious imagery in popular culture. This also links to current research I am doing on developing an intersectional approach to violence prevention with Professor Alison Phipps (Sussex) and Dr Tiffany Page (Cambridge).

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?

 My research is directly related to challenging gender-related violence, through fundamental research on young people’s experiences and understandings of violence, as well as through applied research on prevention and intervention initiatives. I am keen to develop this applied focus, as it crosses over with activist work in school settings.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 13: Sofia Rehman

by Johanna Stiebert on

On Day 13 of the 16 Days of Activism campaign we speak to Sofia Rehman, PhD student at the University of Leeds and activist.

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?
My name is Sofia Rehman and I am a second year PhD candidate at the University of Leeds. My research allows me the pleasure of being supervised in the Theology department as well as the Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern department. My current research centers around a 12th Century Islamic text by Imam Badr al-Din al-Zarkashi entitled al-Ijāba li-Īrādi mā Istadrakathu cĀ’isha cala al Sahāba – The Corrective: Aisha’s Refutations of the Companions, in which the statements of Aisha, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad, are collected wherein she is found to be correcting, refuting, or outright disqualifying statements made by invariably male Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, on matters pertinent to the understanding and practice of religion by Muslims. I am working on a translation and feminist study of the original text.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?
Before returning to academia, I spent a number of years teaching within my local Muslim community, either in local mosques, or in my own home. This made me privy to many of the issues Muslim women face, and the ways in which both patriarchal interpretations of the religion within the community and gendered Islamophobia from outside the community oftentimes leave Muslim women doubly violated and doubly silenced. I had already studied in Islamic seminaries and received traditional instruction in Islam, so in 2014 I decided to return to academia and embarked on my Masters in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Leeds, and continued on to do my PhD thereafter. Whilst I had entered academia with the aim of expanding my own understanding of gender and religion, with particular emphasis on Islam, I was also invested in contributing to the effort of unreading patriarchal interpretations of its texts, more specifically the hadith tradition which purports to transmit the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad.

It is central to my outlook on research that my work be not only academically rigorous, but also of service and benefit to the Muslim community, most particularly the women. In pursuit of this then, I was able to secure some funding as Impact Fellow (2015) in the Theology and Religious Studies department, which I used to deliver a series of three workshops through the Muslim Women’s Council to a group of local Muslim women from Bradford. Each session spotlighted a different Muslim woman, one of which was Aisha, for whom I presented findings directly related to my research. We were able to discuss the importance of historicizing and contextualizing Prophetic statements, and the importance of being at liberty to question the veracity of such statements. It was thoroughly rewarding to witness the electric atmosphere of women feeling empowered through their faith tradition.

Additionally, I have recently been asked to take part as a contributor to an upcoming anthology, Cut From the Same Cloth, with Unbound Publishers, which recently enjoyed a flurry of attention when Hollywood actor, Riz Ahmed tweeted about the project. The aim is to platform 15 British Muslim women from a range of backgrounds to write on their experiences. This is an opportunity to allow Muslim women the chance to speak for themselves instead of being spoken over and about; to not be tokenized in a campaign aiming to tick a diversity box, weaponized in anti-terror political rhetoric, or utilized to the satisfaction of someone’s saviour complex. More can be learned about the project here.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?
I was made aware of the Shiloh Project through Johanna Stiebert. While the primary focus of the project is the Bible and interpretations of it, I can see how many of the efforts can inform my own work on Islamic texts, and showcase approaches that can be transferred too. Understanding that religion plays its own role in the rape culture inherent to the society in which we exist, allows for a more effective dismantling of this culture through the deconstruction of its component parts. The interrogation of narratives constructed around religious texts that allow for gender-based violence to be perpetrated, is vital in not only providing thought-provoking, insightful academic contributions but also in facilitating grassroots changes and actively impacting on people’s lives.

 

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16 Days of Activism – Day 12: Rosinah Gabaitse

by Rosie Gabaitse on

On Day 12 of UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism campaign, we profile Rosinah Gabaitse, Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies at the University of Botswana.

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?
My  name is Dr Rosinah Gabaitse and I research and teach on the topic of Biblical Studies at the University of Botswana. I wear many hats: I am an activist, a mother of three sons, an academic and a member of the global community, speaking out and fighting against violence perpetrated on anyone vulnerable, including women and girls. Currently I am a postdoctoral fellow, funded by the Humboldt Foundation, based at the University of Bamberg in Germany.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?
We live in a gendered world and human beings are categorised according to their  socially constructed and assigned gender.  Unfortunately, gender is widely used to determine who has power, who is rendered voiceless, who speaks when and how. We cannot escape the many ways that gender has been used by societies to silence, oppress, and deny access to resources. In my own context violence against women perpetrated most often by men is sadly common. Consequently, my involvement in gender dynamics is personal because I am a woman, and therefore socially assigned the female gender, which has left me, like many women in Botswana, disadvantaged in terms of access to resources, sexual harassment, and being undermined in the work place. Because this is unjust, gender activism is part and parcel of who I am as a woman inhabiting patriarchal structures. I am overt about  teaching egalitarian values and I speak out against the inequality between men and women and between heterosexual and homosexual persons. In Botswana, male homosexual activity is classified a crime against nature – and I resist the injustice of this. I teach that God rejoices in equality and respectful, tolerant and peaceful coexistence, hence my involvement with gender activism.

My work intersects with gender activism in many ways. First, as I teach at the university, my standing in front of the students as a female teaching Biblical Studies is in and of itself engaging in some form of gender activism. Theology is primarily the reserve of men in most cultures, Botswana included. So, when I teach already ordained ministers or trainee preachers about the Bible and the life-giving ways of reading it, I am already making a point about gender. Teaching theology  as a woman is transgressing boundaries on its own in a discipline dominated by men, like my own. Further, I am intentional about being a gender activist. I am intentional about speaking out against, for example, the violence of rape and murder poured out against the concubine in Judges 19, or Hosea’s wife Gomer, or the many other stories of violence narrated in the Bible. After engaging these texts of terror (a phrase from Phyllis Trible), I require that  my audiences (be it in the church or classroom) contextualize the biblical texts in terms of the social realities of our own communities where intimate femicide, shaming women in public, and sexualized physical violence are rife and tearing our communities apart. I am intentional about engaging the many hurts and abuses that women endure, just because they are women. I also write about violence against women as I reflect on how we have bestowed males with enormous power often by using a few select biblical texts, sometimes with violent consequences for women.  However, I also know it is true that the same Bible that has been used to legitimate and support violence is life-giving and can also be used to raise up a man who abhors violence against women. Therefore, my work engages the Bible to deconstruct violence and reconstruct the life-giving power of the Gospel.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

The Shiloh Project engages scholars and  communities on the topic of rape culture. Obviously the people who are most vulnerable to rape are women and children, because they have been rendered vulnerable and less empowered by dominant social structures. Resisting this is exactly what I do in my little corner in Botswana and The Shiloh Project gives me a forum and a resource for my activities, now and going forward.

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?
I am already active in this area and I will continue to be so. Like I mentioned above, my teaching  at the University of Botswana mainstreams topics on violence against women – from what the Bible teaches or does not teach about  gender-based violence, to how the churches are silent about the issue, to how their preaching  contributes to violence against women and how  violent men are constructed through particular and toxic kinds of biblical interpretation.

In 2016, I and another young lady from Botswana, Wendy Maano, intentionally selected  one school and worked together to teach children about violence. We had  a series of conversations with children about non-violent ways of communicating and being, teaching them to stand up against violence against the vulnerable girl child in particular. We also had a series of conversations on violence with parents. As part of my community service and in my capacity as motivational speaker, I engage young people in schools on issues of violence against women,  in order defuse rape culture manifestations early on. The boy child, who may have a propensity towards committing violence later on in life, needs to be taught very early on what violence against women is. I want to share a saying going around in a group I belong to made up of men and women and called ‘Women and Men Against All  Sexual Abuse of Children’, which goes like this: ‘Not all men are actual rapists. Some are rape apologists. Some tell rape jokes. Some are victim blamers. Some are silent.’ The saying captures where very many men are and my work with boys really aims at teaching them the ways of responding to gender-based violence. Of course it is important not to commit acts of gender-based violence but things won’t actually get better until men not only forsake violence but also denounce and resist and challenge other forms of gender-based inequality. This is particularly important within a community like mine where there still isn’t much open talk about the topic of rape and gender-based injustice.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 11: Samantha Joo

by Samantha Joo on

We mark the eleventh day of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence by speaking to gender activist and researcher, Samantha Joo.

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

 I had taught Hebrew Bible at a number of academic institutions.  My last appointment was at Seoul Women’s University.  However, during my father’s illness and eventual death, I felt lost and decided to leave academia.  I was tired of living in cities I hated, writing on subject matters that only appealed to a few people, and teaching courses to students most of whom did not care about their education.  All at extremely low pay.  So after some soul-searching, I started my own nonprofit organization, Platform (https://www.platform4women.org), and opened a new business to financially support my work. Now, I write about topics relevant to my community, work with people who I believe will be effective visionary leaders, and live in a city that I choose.

What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?

For some reason, I had always associated activism with protests, marching out in the streets or blockading some politician’s office.  Since I was a more private person, I did not consider myself an activist, and definitely not a gender activist.  But now, I think differently.  I had the makings of an activist in my early career but it did not become manifest until I started teaching at Seoul Women’s University.  It was here that I met some of the brightest, passionate women who had limited themselves by unconsciously accepting traditional societal expectations.  To model my own teachings on gender equality and social justice, I felt I had to “out” myself through activism.  I started Queer Koreans Alliance (QKA) which jumpstarted the first LGBTQ teen safe space, Dding Dong, in Seoul, South Korea.  I felt that I could not ask my students to make a difference without daring to make change myself.

In developing Dding Dong and teaching at SWU, I visualized a center to train emerging women leaders for social justice.  It took a long time to turn the vision into reality, but I well under way to developing a nonprofit organization, Platform.  Platform intends to mentor/train women with a passion and a vision for the marginalized in API communities.  It empowers women to work more effectively for the oppressed in their communities.

How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?

Interestingly, I had written an article on the politics of “comfort women” in Korea.  Johanna Stiebert happened to be one of the reviewers and wanted to include a shorter version of the essay on The Shiloh Project.  Of course, I was honored to share my article on the website but it was more than an opportunity to capture a wider audience.  The Shiloh Project is a mission-driven platform to explore gender-based violence and religion.  It has everything to do with my work and scholarship because rape culture affects all women and men.

But more specifically, I am writing an article on rape and silence in the Bible.  I analyze the story of Tamar and Amnon in which many commentators have written about the terror of Absalom silencing his beloved sister, Tamar.  On the contrary, Tamar is not silenced but actually speaks through her body.  The biblical author alludes to her desolation which is a subtle reference to the silent language of the oppressed.  This language is commonplace in many cultures where women cannot vocalize but embody their stories.

I am able to share such essays on The Shiloh Project to a wider audience.  I personally do not know of any other platform where this is possible.

How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?

Many of the nonprofit organizations in the Asian and Pacific Islander communities have been established to combat gender-based violence, specifically domestic violence.  Platform will not only train women to serve victims of domestic violence but to create a space in which women can discuss and find systemic solutions to end it.  Since Platform is invested in women leaders as well as the marginalized in API communities, we are empowering grassroots movements to “resist” and “fight” oppression.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 9: Valerie Hobbs

by Valerie Hobbs on

We interview Valerie Hobbs, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, on the ninth day of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence campaign.

Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?

My name is Valerie Hobbs, and I am a linguist at the University of Sheffield. I am one of those scholars who likes to do all sorts of things, but most of my research and teaching orbits around the areas of English for Specific Purposes, with a focus on religious language. In other words, I’m interested in how different groups of people use language in ways that suit their particular needs and goals.

How did you get involved in The Shiloh Project?

Katie Edwards, a friend and colleague at Sheffield, invited me along to a workshop on religion and rape culture in Leeds, where I met Johanna Stiebert, Caroline Blyth, Nechama Hadari, Emma Nagouse, and Jessica Keady. What impressed me about this group was the balance they strive for and achieve between diversity of perspectives and singular focus on examining and confronting the ways in which religion is used to incite and validate violence towards women. This is a group of scholars who unite around a shared interest and purpose but who invite discussion. In my experience, this is rare.

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?

A few years ago, I decided to take a break from work I was doing on language in philosophy and write a paper on a topic I’ve long been mulling over: how the conservative Christian church talks about feminism. This work prompted an invitation to attend the ecclesiastical trial of a pastor in the USA who refused to require his disabled wife to attend church. As a professing Christian, I was motivated by this experience to focus my work on issues that powerfully shape and affect religious women.

Since then, I have worked on, for example, Christian sermons on divorce, as a way to investigate the ways in which pastors (don’t) preach about domestic violence. Over the summer, I contributed a chapter based on this project to the series of volumes on Rape Culture and Religion, edited by Shiloh Project leaders Caroline Blyth and Katie Edwards along with Emily Colgan. I have plans for further projects on gender in sermons (since sermons are highly significant within the Christian context), but I’m also interested in hymns.

Then there is the activism that necessarily accompanies my scholarly work. I am grateful to have had opportunities to support Christian women who have endured various forms of violence by men in the church, including not only their spouses but also Christian leaders who too often use the Bible to minimize, excuse, and even justify physical and emotional abuse. Recent public-facing work stemming from these interactions has included, for example, a series on the ways in which church governments handle abuse cases. But I also spend time writing e-mails and letters and talking on the phone in an effort to support women whom men have abused.

How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today?

Faith and religion are an important source of identity and ideology for billions of people around the world. As a result, religious ideas are not confined to religious contexts but have made their way into all sorts of cultural contexts. Advertising, news media, and politics are just some of the places where we find traces of religion, and powerful players in society often deliberately draw on religion to attract followers.

In my view, one of The Shiloh Project’s most significant contributions to the discussion about gender activism are the ways in which it makes explicit these links between religion and cultural attitudes to gender roles. This involves examining the religious doctrine itself as well as how and where doctrine manifests itself in society. For example, the Shiloh Project’s Katie Edwards has done some ground-breaking work on the ways in which advertisers draw from the Creation account in Genesis and capitalize on common representations of Eve as seductress.

However, at the risk of sounding pessimistic, I think we must be modest in our ambitions to bring about change in society around us. While much work has been done on the issue of gender-based violence and discrimination, yet the problem persists and seems even more entrenched. We can easily grow discouraged. I’ve concluded that I must act on my convictions but resist being so arrogant as to think my work will even begin to fix what is wrong with the world. That runs counter to the message we get from academia these days, where we are encouraged to plan for and measure the impact of our research and rate our value accordingly. But I don’t believe impact is up to us. Instead, as I see it, at the heart of The Shiloh Project is simply this: love your neighbour. If society becomes any better as a result of anything we do, if we positively influence even one person who encounters our work, that is a great mercy.

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

I recently wrapped up my work on divorce sermons and hope to have another recently submitted paper on this project accepted for publication in the spring. I am now working on two other projects: language of discrimination in religious institutions and discourse of consent among popular Christian organizations. I’m also working on a proposal for a book which will draw on my work in these various areas. There is so much work to do and so little time! My Shiloh Project colleagues are doing all manner of funded projects, and it is inspiring to be surrounded by such driven academics.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 8: Emily Colgan

by Emily Colgan on

Our tenth interview to mark the 16 Days of Activism is from Emily Colgan.

Emily is a Lecturer in Theology at Trinity Theological College in Auckland, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the relationship between the Bible and contemporary social imaginaries, asking about the degree to which the ideologies contained within biblical texts continue to inform communities in the present. Emily is particularly interested in ecological representations in the Bible, as well as depictions of gender and violence. Emily has written chapters in Sexuality, Ideology and the Bible: Antipodean Engagements (Sheffield Phoenix, 2015), The Nature of Things: Rediscovering the Spiritual in God’s Creation (Wipf and Stock, 2016), The Bible and Art: Perspectives from Oceania (Bloomsbury, 2017), and The Oxford Handbook on Bible and Ecology (Oxford University, forthcoming). Most recently, Emily has co-edited a multi-volume work with Caroline Blyth and Katie Edwards entitled Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion (Palgrave, forthcoming).

Email: [email protected]

 Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?

I’m Emily and I lecture in Biblical Studies and Theology at Trinity College in Auckland, New Zealand. In my research, I am interested in the relationship between the Bible and contemporary social imaginaries, particularly the degree to which the ideologies contained within biblical texts continue to inform communities in the present. My work to date has focused on ecological representations in the Bible, as well as depictions of gender and violence in this text.

What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?

I first heard about The Shiloh Project through my friend and colleague, Caroline Blyth. Together with Johanna Stiebert and Katie Edwards, Caroline established this hugely important project, creating an inclusive community which promotes research into the phenomenon of rape culture and religion. I was super keen to be part of this exciting initiative and so enthusiastically signed up as a member. I believe the work of this community extremely urgent and I feel very privileged to be involved.

How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?

 I have long been interested in feminist interpretation of the Bible, but my interest in rape culture, gender violence, and biblical texts really took shape as I wrote my doctoral dissertation. As part of my research I explored the sexual and gendered metaphor of land as woman in Jeremiah, arguing that this text encodes a sexual logic based upon a heterosexual binary which polarizes a masculine, penetrative God and a feminized, emasculated Land. The more I explored the Jeremianic rhetoric of rape, which relates to both women and land, the more I came to realise that this very same rhetoric continues to characterize discourse around women and land in the present day. From here I became acutely interested in the role of the Bible as a foundation upon which contemporary rape-supportive ideologies and belief systems are built.

Since then, I have had the privilege of working with Caroline Blyth and Katie Edwards on a multi-volume work entitled Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion. These books draw together a wide variety of methodological approaches and hermeneutical lenses to critically explore the complex and multifaceted relationships that exist between gender violence and various religious traditions. My own research for this volume focused on rape culture, gender violence, and evangelical Christian self-help literature. Although this was a completely new area of exploration for me, I found it fascinating (and deeply troubling) and would love to do more sustained work in this area.

How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today?

Given the horrific levels of gender violence in societies around the world, and the all-pervasive presence of rape cultures that sustain such violence, the task of The Shiloh Project to interrogate and disrupt rape-supportive discourse, particularly in the context of religion, is an incredibly urgent one.

For me, the most important thing about The Shiloh Project is that it is not interested in research for the sake of research; the scholarship of its members is more than just an academic exercise. We live in a world where sexual violence, family violence, homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia have become a lived reality for many people. Such violence is often (explicitly or implicitly) endorsed by faith communities and religious traditions. The Shiloh Project is deeply invested in the lived experiences of real human beings, and in standing against gender violence in all its manifestations, this research community endeavours to bring about positive change for those whose lives are adversely impacted by this violence.

What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?

As I noted above, I am really keen to continue my research around rape culture, gender violence, and evangelical Christian self-help literature. As someone who was not brought up in an evangelical tradition, I was unaware of how popular this literature is, particularly amongst young Christian women. What concerns me about this literature is its affirmation of traditional gender roles and the potential violence associated with such hierarchical relationality. I am hoping to work on this project with Caroline Blyth, one of the directors of The Shiloh Project. One of my hopes for our research in this area is that it will be accessible to readers beyond the academy – potentially, the same readers who engage with Christian self-help literature. I am so grateful to The Shiloh Project for providing a platform where this might actually be possible.

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16 Days of Activism – Day 8: Claire Cunnington

by Claire Cunnington on
To mark Day 8 of the 16 Days of Activism our interview is from Claire Cunnington, PhD student at the University of Sheffield.
Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?
I’m a Wellcome Trust funded PhD student at the University of Sheffield, researching what helps or hinders adults recovering from childhood sexual abuse.
What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?
I’m a member of The Shiloh Project.
How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?
I’m researching the way in which the dominant discourse around rape and abuse affects a victim’s ability to recover. Religion, particularly Christianity in the UK, has influenced this discourse. The Shiloh Project’s discussion of rape culture and the Bible is examining the wider context and my research is, in part, examining the impact.
How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today? 
By highlighting and questioning the origins of victim-blaming.
What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?
I am currently running a qualitative survey on recovery for adult survivors, which looks at what helps and hinders recovery. The survey can be found here: http://bit.ly/recoveringcsa. This includes a question about religion and spirituality. I aim to produce a paper discussing the influence of religion on recovery for adults who have experienced childhood sexual abuse.
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