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Gender Studies

UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 11: Tat-siong Benny Liew

by Tat-siong Benny Liew on

Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Tat-siong Benny Liew, and I am currently Class of 1956 Professor in New Testament Studies at the College of Holy Cross.  Holy Cross is a Jesuit liberal arts college located in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA; however, I am not a Catholic.  

Although I have been living in North America for over 30 years, I was born in Hong Kong.  Since my father passed away when I was relatively young, my mother, who was strong and wise despite of having only an elementary education, basically raised me and my five siblings all by herself.  For both of my primary and secondary education in Hong Kong, I attended an Anglican school that is only for boys.  During most of those years and in that particular environment, I am sad to say that I had bought into many of the dominant and pervasive gender ideologies. When my eldest sister became a pastor of a local church, she experienced many discriminatory treatments that were based on gender; for instance, her district superintendent tried to tell her that the denomination would not provide housing for her because she could live with her family as a single and unmarried woman.  While homophobia was and is by no means absent in Hong Kong, I only witnessed it first hand after I moved to the USA to continue my studies.  

Besides learning from my own mother and my eldest sister, I am fortunate to have many wise and powerful female or queer teachers and colleagues who helped me gain a better sense and sensibility about various matters pertaining to gender.  My teaching and scholarship about religion in general and the Bible in particular have, as a result, always attended to gender-based dynamics and violence, as well as how they intersect with other identity factors and power differentials.  Both of the Bible courses I am teaching this semester, for instance, are cross-listed for the College’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program.  Without implying that my academic work is separable from activism, I have found it more and more important to become personally involved in public movements and protestsagainst discrimination and violence on the basis of gender.

How do you think the Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to and enrich discussion and action on the topic of gender activism today? Is there more we can do? What else should we post?

I like the term being used by the Shiloh Project: rape culture.  The word “culture” implies that one cannot look at the act of rape by itself; we must understand that a lot of things have happened before and around rape to enable the act.  Because of this, I would like to see more explicit and more intentional research and work being done on sexual invective and harassment.

I am thinking here of the recent work by David Shepherd.  Instead of focusing on the blatant horror against women in the book of Judges (such as the rape and dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19, or the violent capturing of women in Judges 21), Shepherd uses the explicit mention of Judges in the beginning of Ruth (Ruth 1:1) to point to the subtlerpresence of sexual harassment against a foreign, female worker such as Ruth in the fields of Boaz.  The fact that Boaz has to tell Ruth to always keep company with other women workers and to glean so only after the male workers are done, even though he has already told his men not to bother Ruth (Ruth 2:8-9), signifies that Boaz is cognizant of the pervasive danger and widespread threat against women workers and this is further confirmed by Naomi (Ruth 2:22).  Although Shepherd uses explicit violence against women to inform his reading of implicit harassment, one may see explicit violence and implicit harassment against women as mutually reinforcing phenomena.

Since we are talking about a culture that enables and condones rapes and other kinds of gender-based violence, I wonder if the Shiloh Project can develop an instrument (such as a survey) that can help institutions (such as faith communities and schools) to get a sense of its climate and culture regarding gender-based discrimination and violence.  (Note: I owe this idea to Sarah Shectman and Seth Sanders of SBAllies.)

In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?  

In the coming year, I plan to be involved in campus activism that seeks to address sexual harassment and violence within my ownCollege community, including emphasis on preventive measures (such as campus-wide education to increase awareness) and institutional accountability.  These important efforts are once again about changing a culture: institutional culture.  I also plan to teach again a course on “Sex, Money, Power, and the Bible” to help students explore how our readings of the Bible may figure and reconfigure our understandings and practices of sex, money, and power in both helpful and harming ways. Finally, I will continue to research and write about gender violence as a biblical studies scholar.

   

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 10: Miryam Sivan

by Miryam Sivan on
Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Dr. Miryam Sivan and I am a fiction writer and lecturer in literature at the University of Haifa in Israel. I am originally from New York City and it was growing up on the ‘tough’ city streets that caused my feminist consciousness and inevitable recognition of male predation to be formed. For decades I was involved in Holocaust stories and the silence around sexual violence inflicted on Jewish women during the war always seemed ‘off’ to me. I am not a historian so I did not research primary archival sources to unearth the violence that did occur, but as a literary critic I focused on the threads of this violence as seen in testimonial literature and fiction. My article on the Polish-Israeli writer, Yehiel Dinur, whose early novels were concerned with sexual predation in the concentration camps, was included in Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust. Published in 2010, decades after the war ended! it was the first scholarly volume that dealt with the topic. For many years I have been an Advisory Board member of Remember the Women Institute, dedicated to “including women in history since 1997,” including the exposure and dissection of gender based violence. In 2014 I published a short story collection, SNAFU and Other Stories in which one story, “Traffic,” deals explicitly with this kind of violence. In 14 short vignettes I ‘expose’ scenarios in the various religious and ethnic communities of Israel where women’s bodies are violated not in exceptional ways but in socially ‘common’ ways.  In Israel where there is no separation of religion and state, outdated and misogynistic religious laws still govern women’s lives to a frightening degree.

How do you think the Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to and enrich discussion and action on the topic of gender activism today? Is there more we can do? What else should we post?

I think the Shiloh Project is engaged in important and wonderful work. I think your range of articles is extensive and highly informative.

In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?

In April 2019 my novel, Make it Concrete, will be published in New York. It is a story about a woman who ghostwrites Holocaust memoirs while her own mother, a Holocaust survivor, will not talk about her war time experiences. To avoid ‘spoilers’ I won’t give any more details, but I can say that sexual violence and its repercussions play a critical role in the unfolding narrative drama.

I will continue to include in my curriculum, particularly in my Literature of the Holocaust course, literary texts that deal openly with sexual violence. In my Israel Stories course (both these courses are in the International School of the University of Haifa – with students from many countries) we read texts and watch films that directly show how religious Jewish law blatantly and unapologetically discriminates against women.

In addition, I am working on a screenplay about a sexual predator and the atmosphere of male privilege which is part and parcel of patriarchal religions and the societies they are a part of will be highlighted and critiqued.  

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 8: Antonia McGrath

by Johanna Stiebert on

Today’s activist is Masters student and NGO co-founder Antonia McGrath.

 Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

 My name is Antonia McGrath and I’m a Masters student of International Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and one of the founders and directors of a small non-profit organization called educate. that works to support community-driven educational projects in Honduras.

 educate. was founded by myself and an incredible friend of mine called Lisa after we both spent a year living and working in Honduras. I was working in a small aldea on the outskirts of a city on the north coast in a home for ex-street children, and Lisa in a coffee-growing town as an English teacher at 9 rural public schools. In Honduras, we witnessed not only extreme poverty, violence, and some of the highest levels of economic inequality in Latin America, but also the ways in which some of the NGOs and development organizations in the area worked in ways that were very top-down, where they imposed projects without local leadership or anyappreciation of the cultural context – and sometimes even without an existing need. In a TEDx talk I gave almost two years ago now, I highlighted some examples of my experiences with these kinds of issues.

 For us, starting educate. was not only a way to support some of the communities we had lived and spent time in during our year in Honduras, but a way to work to subvert the idea of ‘aid’ and to allow Honduran individuals and communities to approach us and gain support for their own projects. We work with incredible teams of teachers and educators, community leaders, and people from other grassroots organizations, running projects that are really built from the ground up. For example, we run a scholarship programme through local public high schools; we have supported the starting of community-run libraries at public schools in both rural and urban areas; we funded the start-up costs of an animal therapy mental health programme at a children’s home; and we currently finance a community-run nutrition centre that is gaining increasing self-sustainability through an adjacent farm project. Outside of this more practical work on the ground, we also workto promote discussion about decolonizing the ways in which aid and development are thought about and practised.

 While our focus on education doesn’t directly address the Shiloh Project’s themes of rape culture, religion and gender-based inequalities and violence, these are topics we do heavily engage with within our work. Especially when discussing projects and working with our team in Honduras, the ways in which our work relates to themes of gender (in)equality is something we think very deeply about. Our scholarship programme for example, through its support of several incredibly passionate and driven young women from underprivileged backgrounds, is helping provide opportunities for women to study at the university level – something that, while not entirely uncommon, is still dominated by men and especially by those from privileged backgrounds. This scholarship programme, through the women it is supporting, is definitely helping to break down the cultural norms and stereotypes surrounding who ‘should’ be taking up these spaces at university.

 One of our scholarship recipients, who is studying industrial engineering, has recently taken a women’sstudies class as an elective, and the last time I met up with her we had a long conversation about her experience studying in what is a heavily male-dominated programme. Though she felt confident in her own abilities to succeed, she said she was often faced with scepticism from her male classmates who would ask her why she was studying such a difficult subject that was ‘meant for guys’.

 Despite all the ways in which the Honduran culture ofmachismo (sexism) affects women, recently I’ve also been thinking more about the ways in which adolescent boys and young men in Honduras can also be socially excluded based on cultural concepts of masculinity. Honduras has a huge problem of gang violence, and the image of the young male in Central America, and particularly in the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala) is of a strong, tough andoften-violent gang member. I think these images and stereotypes can cause young men to become extremely socially excluded, which only heightens the likelihood of them being pushed into criminal groups. I worry about some of the young boys I know who spend a lot of time on the streets, because there are so few opportunities made available to young men, especially in marginalized and often violent urban areas, that don’t involve crime. Of course young boys on the streets join gangs – it’s a family, it’s protection, it makes perfect sense. But it’s also a huge problem. At educate., we’ve been working to make sure that our scholarship programme, which has so far only attracted young women, is also actively promoted amongst young men, so as to ensure that they are not being unintentionally excluded from this opportunity. I think empowering young women is essential, but in Honduras I also see a definite need for more opportunities being made available for young men.

 Honduras has been in the news a fair amount over the past year or so, though not for the most positive ofreasons. In November 2017, protests broke out across the country after a stolen presidential election. I was in Honduras at the time, and was stuck on my friend’s farm for over a week as roads were blocked with barricades of burning tyres. Now, with the migrant caravan traveling north through Mexico, Honduras has been in the news again. A friend of mine, whom I met when he was on hunger strike protesting government corruption inHonduras in 2015, is part of the caravan, and he’s documenting it through his photography on Facebook. I’ve been working with him to put together articles and photo essays for educate.‘s website to raise awareness from a more Honduran perspective, because most of the news about it focuses on a very US-centred view of the caravan.

 Many of the female migrants in the caravan are fleeing from gender-based forms of violence. The rate of femicide in Honduras is unprecedented, and other kinds of violence against women are hugely widespread as well. There are countless Honduran women who leave as a result of this – domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, even attempted murder. It’s something that isvery present in everyday life in Honduras. There was a 17-year-old girl in the village where I used to live who lost her hand after a man tried to rape her and, when she resisted, he attacked her with a machete. This was just a few months ago, when I was back in Honduras most recently, and she was taken to the hospital in the back of a friend’s truck with her mother. As far as I’ve heard, they weren’t able to properly re-attach her hand. Her family is incredibly poor; her father couldn’t even afford the bus to the hospital to go and see her. I’ve been trying to reach out to the family to see if we can support them, but it has been hard to make contact.

How do you think the Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to and enrich discussion and action on the topic of gender activism today? Is there more we can do? What else should we post?

 I think the work that the Shiloh Project is doing on religion and rape culture is hugely important. Rape culture is an especially pertinent topic at the moment, what with the whole #MeToo movement and prominent cases of sexual assault taking centre stage in international news. It’s a topic that absolutely warrants further discussion. I think it’s also vital to continue promoting diverse perspectives on these issues, and I think the Shiloh Project is doing a great job of that.

 In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?

 As I mentioned, we’re trying to broaden the reach of our scholarship programme to continue providing opportunities for young women and men in Honduras to study beyond high school. This is a life-changing opportunity for the young people we support, and has far-reaching consequences within their families and broader communities as well. At present, we are supporting young women studying in very male-dominated fields (medicine and engineering), and we’re hoping to be able to support some young men as well. I think the role that these scholarship opportunities can play in creating role models for young people of all genders within their own communities is a way to work towards breaking down the gendered stereotypes that are so prevalent in Honduras – without those values being externally imposed.

This picture shows a young student in one of the libraries supported by educate.

 In an upcoming project for educate. where we are working with several rural primary schools to start libraries, ideas surrounding stereotypes and the importance of representation have come into play in our discussions once again. Something that has been important for us while working with the teachers in Honduras to put together lists of books for the libraries has been ensuring not only that the chosen books are culturally relevant and of course in Spanish, but that there are books that challenge traditional gender norms. For young girls as well as boys, I think it is important that the stories that they are exposed to are ones where they can see diverse representations of themselves. We’re trying to get hold of Latin American children’s books that show powerful women, people of various gender identities, and people from different cultures and ethnicities (within Latin America and even within Honduras, there are numerous ethnic groups).

 We’ve just launched an Amazon Wish List campaignwhere people from anywhere in the world can directly purchase a book for one of these libraries. When you purchase a book, it gets sent directly to us and we will sort and transport them to each of the schools in July 2019. Each community is currently working to plan their library space and will come together to paint and set up the library before the books are brought in. All of these libraries are being designed and constructed by teachers and community leaders and will provide literary resources to a total of over 500 primary school childrenin rural areas of Honduras. We’d love to have people get involved by purchasing a book (or two!) here:https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/dl/invite/catEvAE

 Antonia is a previous contributor to the Shiloh Project.

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 8: Emma Tomalin

by Emma Tomalin on
Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do? 

My name is Emma Tomalin and I am Professor of Religion and Public Life at the University of Leeds. A major focus of my academic career has been upon better understanding the role that religious traditions play in what we might broadly call ‘development’ in the Global South.  This local level research is contextualized against the backdrop of the neglect of/poor understanding of religious dynamics amongst the secular global elites who control development cooperation and humanitarian aid. The marginalization of the consideration of religious dynamics from mainstream development and humanitarian processes is particularly worrisome for women, since an important underlying factor in their discrimination – patriarchal tendencies within religious traditions – remains either obscured or essentialized in analyses of gender inequality that inform global development policy. Either religious dynamics are seen as irrelevant or are viewed as the major cause of inequality: these are perspectives that are unhelpful in forming the kinds of alliances with local faith actors that are in my view essential to rooting out inequality and discrimination against women and girls.

It is clear that patriarchal views within religions play a role in shaping gender divisions that exacerbate the likelihood of women and girls experiencing gender-based violence and trafficking. However, it is also clear that many faith actors play a crucial role in challenging gender inequalities within religious traditions and also provide support and advocacy for women and girls who have experienced gender-based violence and trafficking. I have been fortunate to become involved in a number of research project that address these issues and that aim to better understand the role of local faith actors in perpetuating and challenging gender inequality in their traditions, and then feeding those findings back to a secular global development audience. I have worked with Buddhist nuns in Thailand who are campaigning for the ability to fully ordain as bhikkhuni in order to challenge the negative perception of women as a lower rebirth than men, which can exacerbate their acceptance of domestic violence or the inevitability of entering the sex industry (see this free publication for work in this area). More recently, I have become involved in two projects around religion and anti-trafficking, one focusing on the UK and one with a global reach.

In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?  

In fact, I hope that the Shiloh Project can help me! We are currently carrying out a scoping study for evidence on the role of local faith actors in anti human trafficking and modern slavery for this project, and are looking for individuals and organizations to submit case studies of their work in this area or other materials. Please see here for how you can contribute.

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 7: Kathryn Barber

by Kathryn Barber on

Today’s activist is Kathryn (‘Kate’) Barber, whose important research informs on right-wing religious ideologies. We underestimate these toxic ideologies at our peril.

Tell us about yourself!

I’m Kate Barber, a mature PhD student at Cardiff University, studying in the Centre for Language and Communication Research. I am back behind a desk after seventeen years as a lecturer in Further Education and Higher Education institutions and nearly twenty years since I was an undergraduate doing my Law degree. As much as I miss teaching, I am really enjoying the academic challenges that PhD study presents and having the chance to meet others involved in interesting research. I’ve also been able to participate in projects such as ‘Assuming Gender’, a multidisciplinary student-led project based in Cardiff, which examines issues relating to gender in contemporary society.

 I’ve been studying in Cardiff for three years now as I did a part-time Masters degree here in Forensic Linguistics before starting my PhD in 2017. During my MA, I looked at linguistic issues relating to anti-Muslim hate speech, sexual violence and harassment, rape myths, and consent in rape cases. Many of these themes also feature in my PhD research as I am currently looking athow rape and sexual assault is reframed by far-right extremists on websites and personal blogs, and how this relates to political and social radicalization. My study involves conducting a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis on extremist online sites which intersect networks associated with the Alternative Right and those that belong to what’s known as the Manosphere (a group of sites that promote ‘men’s rights’ and issues but which often includes extreme misogynistic and anti-feminist discourses). Interwoven among these networks are numerous sites that tap into extreme right-wing religious ideologies such as those associated with Christian Identity and sites run by groups identifying as Evangelical Christians and Christian Fundamentalists. By looking at how rape and sexual assault is reframed and how narratives about sexual violence on these sites are used, I’m aiming to analyse if and how the ideologies of these different groups overlap and how counternarratives can be constructed to challenge these online discourses.

 How do you think the Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to and enrich discussion and action on the topic of gender activism today?

In my opinion, The Shiloh Project is doing invaluable work in bringing discussions about religion and rape culture to the fore, especially in the way it challenges representations of sexual violence in media and within a diverse range of communities. Importantly, the project encourages collaboration between scholars, from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, who are similarly motivated to challenge sexual violence and rape culture. The Religion and Rape Culture Conference in July 2018 was the perfect example of this and offered a supportive environment within which several issues were explored by an inspiring group of academics.

In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?  

The next year involves a lot of data analysis for me but I will be following The Shiloh Project with interest as well as writing a post for their blog and getting involved in some interesting initiatives I heard about during the July conference. Hopefully, I’ll also be able to contribute some insights into the influence of extreme right-wing Christian groups on the rape culture perpetuated by far-right extremists online.

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CALL FOR PAPERS – Special Journal Issue: Activism in the Biblical Studies Classroom: Global Perspectives

by Johanna Stiebert on

Call for papers: Special Edition of the Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (JIBS)

Activism in the Biblical Studies Classroom: Global Perspectives

Does activism belong in the university Biblical Studies classroom? If yes, with what purpose, outcome or agenda? Which teaching strategies are effective? How can/should/might Biblical Studies and activism engage with each other?

Activism is understood here as relating to human rights and the abolition of discrimination, including discrimination and activism in relation to:

● Race and ethnicity
● Gender and gender identity
● Sexual orientation
● Class
● Disability and ableism
● HIV status
● Mental health
● Religion, faith and belief
● Fat stigma
● Ageism
● Motherhood and pregnancy
● Voluntary/involuntary childlessness
● Abortion and abortion stigma

This list is indicative and not exhaustive. We welcome submissions on any area of activism in conjunction with any biblical text.

We are looking for practice-focused contributions informed by academic research and/or theory.

Submissions should be between 4000 and 10,000 words.

All submissions will be subject to the usual blind peer review process.

Send proposals to Guest Editor Johanna Stiebert ([email protected]) by 31 March 2019 and completed papers by the 2 January 2020.

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 6: Rachel Starr

by Rachel Starr on

Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

Hi, my name is Rachel Starr and I teach biblical studies, gender and theology at the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education in Birmingham. Queen’s is ecumenical and we have students exploring theology, discipleship and ministry from Anglican, Methodist and Pentecostal churches.

 It would be hard to say what subject I enjoy teaching most, but I love the energy and creativity of the Masters module on global theologies and migration. Faced with the scale and complexity of migration today, we need more theological resources to help us respond to and receive from migrants. In addition, it is important to make visible the migration of traditions and communities of faith throughout history. The work of Argentine theologian Nancy Bedford has been invaluable in exploring the particular experience of Latin American women migrants and the violence they encounter along the way, as well as naming the multiple forms of resistance and strategies of survival they employ. A powerful example of communal resistance to the death-dealing structures and monstrous borders that confront many undocumented migrants is that of Las Patronas, a group of Mexican women who cook and carry food to the tracks where each day trains carrying hundreds of migrants pass by (watch here).

 I completed my doctorate at Instituto Superior Evangélico de Estudios Teológicos in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I learnt much from organizations such as Movimiento Ecuménico por los Derechos Humanos, spending time with local women’s groups that sought to resist and challenge both domestic, and more public forms of, violence. My book, Reimagining Theologies of Marriage in Contexts of Domestic Violence: When Salvation is Survival (Routledge, 2018) explores how Christian accounts of marriage are often static and idealized, failing to take account of violence and gender inequality within relationships.

 The work of Latin American women theologians and activists continues to inspire and challenge me. Doing theology in another language is a means of resisting dominant theological traditions and ensuring we don’t rely on familiar readings of texts and traditions. Last year, I spent a month in Central America, meeting with theologians and activists working on a range of interrelated issues: increasing access to reproductive health care, a life-or-death issue for women in Central America; facilitating debate around masculinity and violence; and challenging street harassment. The image of birds flying in front of the cathedral in the Nicaraguan city of León speaks to me of how even then most static religious structures are in constant and dynamic relationship with lived experience and movements for change.  

 How do you think the Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to and enrich discussion and action on the topic of gender activism today? Is there more we can do? What else should we post?

 The creativity, commitment and community generated by the Shiloh Project seem to me to be important resources for challenging gender-based violence. At the conference last summer, the creativity of the presentations and discussion reminded me of the gift of collaboration between academics and artists, and how creativity is often a source of resistance to violence and oppression. The passionate commitment around naming and shaming violence within the biblical texts and within our own lived contexts was energizing. In particular, I was struck bythe naming of Abraham as a rapist (see a blog post about this paper by Zanne Domoney-Lyttle here). Why is Abraham (and Sarah’s) abuse of Hagar not identified as sexual violence? It reminded me how fiercely faith communities seek to protect the male ‘heroes’ within the biblical text, and how difficult it can be to name what is clearly stated in the text. Finally, the conference enabled me to connect with other scholars and activists working to challenge gender-based violence. The welcoming and supportive atmosphere of the conference reminded me of how important I had found similar networks, such as the Catholic women theologians’ network, Teologanda, of which I had loved being part while living in Argentina.

 In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?  

 I’m currently working on a new edition of SCM Studyguide to Biblical Hermeneutics (2006), co-written with David Holgate. The revised edition will deepen and develop material on how we read the Bible attentive to multiple identities and contexts, as well as exploring resistant readings of the text, drawing on the work of scholars such as Phyllis Trible and Oral A. W. Thomas. Inspired by Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar’s presentation at the Shiloh Project’s Religion and Rape Conference (see a blog post on this presentation here), we ask what kinds of stories do we allow the Bible to tell? And making further use of the work of Gina Hens-Piazza, we suggest ways of seeing, denouncing and resisting violence present within biblical texts and their interpretation. Hens-Piazza’s commentary on Lamentations, part of the new Wisdom Commentary series, is a powerful testimony to the importance of resisting the violence of the text.

With Dulcie Dixon Mckenzie, Director of the Centre for Black Theology at Queen’s, I recently developed a new module for the Common Awards programme, entitled Intersectional Theologies (see here). While the notion of intersectionality has been part of academic discourse for some time, there has been less attention within theology to the complexities of identity and dynamics of power. A particular hope is that the module will generate theological resources appropriate to contemporary British contexts. This module has the potential to be used by any of the nineteen theological institutions working with Durham University as part of Common Awards. At Queen’s, this module will help students make deeper connections between earlier modules focused on Black Theology and on Theology and Gender.

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 3: Jo Sadgrove

by Jo Sadgrove on

Today’s activist is Jo Sadgrove!

 Tell us about yourself.  Who are you and what do you do?

I am Jo and over the past 20 years I have developed a hybrid portfolio of work incorporating both practitioner and scholarly aspects. I seek to facilitate dialogue and transliteration across what are often very distinct ways of thinking, feeling and knowing. I am a Research Fellow in the Centre for Religion and Public Life at Leeds University and I have a job as Research and Policy Advisor at USPG, a 300-year-old Anglican Mission agency working in partnership with local churches around the world. With colleagues, we connect our overseas partners to global policy makers to ensure that their voices are represented in conversations about faith and community development.

My interest in questions of gender, faith and power emerged out of my upbringing as the daughter of an Anglican priest in a church which did not ordain women until 1994. My parents were passionate advocates for women’s ordination, and I was always aware that this was an important issue, but that didn’t alter the fact that I grew up in a church in which only men possessed ritual power. Looking back, it was probably exposure to the Church of England – inhabiting itstheological colleges, churches, cathedrals and the strange semi-public spaces of vicarages and deaneries – that fostered my ethnographic interests. You live on the boundary between public and private when you grow up in a vicarage and there is a very permeable membrane between the family and the wider community.

When I was 18 I went to Uganda and spent time living amongst different communities of women. The contexts were diverse, ranging from the staff quarters of a large urban hotel to remote rural Roman Catholic convents. These intimate domestic experiences brought me face-to-face with starkly gendered issues of power, labour, economics, mobility, pregnancy and child-rearing, violence, embodiment and HIV. They also shot through any emergent assumptions I was developing about the ways that women can and do have agency within different patriarchal power structures. I learned more about western patriarchies and the ways that they constitute women’s bodies and imaginations refracted through the teachings of Ugandan women than I ever did in the context of my British education. These experiences radicalised my thinking, and I remain focussed on the ways that different worldviews – be they ‘cultural’, ‘religious’, biomedical, rights-based –both operate as entirely coherent epistemic totalities that need to be understood on their own terms,and intersect with and antagonise each other. It is in such antagonisms that the underpinning assumptions of different worldviews reveal themselves.

Living in Ugandan communities in the 1990s when many were dying of HIV exposed to me the high costs of the mis–understandings between (western) biomedical approaches and the ethos of Ganda community life. The former is premised, amongst other things, on economically independent atomised individuals who perform particular types of health-seeking behaviour. The ethos of Ganda community life is underpinned by social interconnections and respectability, which position men and women differently and can heavily disadvantage women in the negotiation of their own protection from HIV.

My doctorate analysed sexual and religious youth identities in a Pentecostal community in Kampala in the context of the HIV pandemic. I then went on to work on debates about homosexuality in different parts of the Anglican Communion. This project incorporated a period of time working with Gerald West at the Ujamaa Centre which afforded me my first experience of Contextual Bible Study work, something of which I am only now beginning to understand the importance and value. Eventually I left full-time academia in a desire to work more closely with local communities, the context in which I find myself doing my best learning and thinking, and I got a job undertakingresearch with USPG.

In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?  

My work with USPG bridges the worlds of research and policy. With colleagues in the UK and South Africa I have recently engaged in a piece of research to map and analyze the Anglican Church in Southern Africa’s (ACSA) responses to sexual and gender-based violence, in particular following the death of Anene Booysen in 2013. The next year will see us disseminating this work alongside our international partners to a variety of different audiences, beginning with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York in March.

On 2nd February 2013, 17-year-old Anene Booysen was gang raped and disemboweled in the small town of Bredasdorp, Western Cape, South Africa. Anene was found by a security guard at a construction site near to her home and she later died in hospital from her injuries. This brutal rape and murder horrified the country and re-focused the attention of leaders as to the catastrophic consequences of violence for women and girls in South Africa. At the time of the murder, ACSA’s development arm Hope Africa and staff in False Bay Diocese (in which Bredasdorp is situated)were engaging in community-based work around gender justice. Hope Africa was also part of theinternational ‘We Will Speak Out’ coalition of Christian-based NGOs, churches and organizations against gender-based violence. The murder of Anene generated a number of responses on the part of the Anglican Church engaging different constituent groups.  Survivors of rape and sexual violence were brought together for counselling, peer support and to speak out about their experiences to raise national and international awareness. A number of Christian students at Cape Town’s universities have been involved in Contextual Bible Studies engaging questions of gender using the Tamar Campaign resource. A series of masculinity workshops have engaged men in the Western Cape to think about their own experiences of violence in childhood and reflect on the ways that patterns of violence have been replicated in their own lives, in the lives of their communities and in the churches.

The experiences of those engaged in this work, have revealed a number of things to me about where and how the church both facilitates and mitigates gender parity and abuses of power. When we (and development practitioners) talk about working with ‘the church’ and its leaders we need to think critically about where we locate and identify them. We need to incorporate into our understandings the many different spaces in which groups experience themselves as members of the church and through which ‘the church’ looks and feels very different. The space of Sunday worship, we heard,is a context in which it is very rare to hear anyone talking about gender-based violence, despite the fact that congregations are dealing with it daily. Due to contextual social pressures, parish priests are frequently unwilling to open up conversations that might alienate them from congregants and in turn jeopardize their stipends. On the other hand those who have experienced the masculinities workshops perceive the church to be offering unique homosocial spaces in which men can think and talk about their experiences in ways that are inconceivable in any of the other socialenvironments in which they find themselves. The church here has offered something unique and valuable – a reflective space in which to talk about the violence of apartheid, the violence of childhood and how that violence had, for some, been carried into adult relationships and parenting. Wellness groups for women offer a space of psychosocial support in which women can share the troubles and threats that they face daily, not just in relation to themselves, but also those of the children within their communities. Contextual Bible Study groups using the story of Tamar have opened up discussions between male and female students at local universities as to the complexities of negotiating the differing gender norms of ‘culture’, the Bible and the rights-based constitution. These Bible studies have enabled male and female students to critique the church as lagging behind society, to evaluate the challenges and opportunities of western rights based frameworks and to question the nature of ‘cultural’ authority as embodied by the elders ‘back home’.

There are no easy analyses here and no coherent narratives. The intersections of ‘Biblical’, ‘cultural’ and rights–based norms for gender in South Africa, as everywhere else, are highly complex and varied – mutually reinforcing in certain spaces and highly antagonistic in others. I see the same contests in related work that I am doing within the Church of England around institutional power and sexuality. Across the generations people are struggling with shifting patterns of authority, processes of individuation and the implications for gender norms and the socialization of men and women. I see my own challenge and role in this work as dual and somewhat contradictory; to listen to and amplify the voices that are working hard to redeem the church as irredeemably patriarchal at the same time as broadcasting ever more loudly the critique of all institutions that use their power to marginalize and stratify. We need to remain vigilant and recognize the violent patriarchal biases in the cultural, social and institutional worlds which we inhabit, whilst exploring how norms can be challenged and faith groups can open up distinct spaces of solidarity in which hegemonic gendered worldviews can be resisted.

All this work aside, I actually feel that the most important thing I will continue to do is engage conversations with men and women about gender and power in the home, at the school gate, in the pub, in interactions with colleagues and students and in all of the social contexts in which I find myself. I have benefitted immeasurably from a powerhouse of older female mentors who have gently challenged and steered me through and around my own blind spots. They have helped me to recognize what I might be negotiating as a woman and as a mother and offered me different ways of thinking about what it is to be a feminist in such a challenging set of institutional structures – the church, the university, motherhood. I am supremely grateful to the women whom I meet from around the world who have spent their lives challenging unjust structures and taught me much about how to use my privilege to do my part.

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Outlander Soul Podcast: Sexual Violence in Outlander (discussion with Emma Nagouse)

by Outlander Soul on

Outlander Soul continues part 2 of their conversation with Emma Nagouse, whose research at the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (SIIBS) at the University of Sheffield (UK) focuses on religion and sexual violence. In this episode, Emma and Jayme Reaves discuss Christ imagery and suffering, the Geneva & Laoghaire question, Fergus, and sexual violence as depicted in Outlander more generally.

(An obvious trigger warning that there will be discussion of rape, sexual violence, and rape culture in this episode).

 

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 2: Heather McKay

by Heather McKay on

Today’s activist is Heather McKay.

Tell us about yourself! Who are you and what do you do?

I am Professor Heather A. McKay (née Ayre), MSc, BD, PhD, FHEA.

In education, I am a product of an all-female grammar school in Glasgow where we were taught that we could easily achieve what males achieve. Then I studied at Glasgow University and earned two Science degrees (BSc and MSc) as a young woman and, as a mature woman, two degrees in Biblical Studies (BD and PhD inDivinity). In between I was a horse rider for leisure and a hospital laboratory worker and researcher, a mother and a National Childbirth Trust Breast-feeding Counsellor and Teacher of Antenatal Preparation classes, both of the lattermost for several years in Glasgow, and then, Sheffield. In the late sixties, I worked as a schoolteacher in Ely (Cambridgeshire) and, later, in Glasgow, sandwiching four years as a lecturer in Biological Sciences at Napier University, Edinburgh. After gaining my Bachelor of Divinity, I worked as a student minister for a year then became a schoolteacher again, this time in Religious Studies and Religious Education. After a few more years in schools and John Leggott Sixth Form College in Scunthorpe, I became Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at Edge Hill University, Lancashire and worked there till my retirement having been granted a personal chair meanwhile. I particularly enjoyed, there, teaching the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education for new lecturers at Edge Hill.

My second husband is David Clines, of much Biblical Studies fame, and my younger son, Dr Robert McKay, is Senior Lecturer in English Literature (also at Sheffield University), specializing in Animal Studies. My older son, Kevin McKay, works in the music industry in London.

How do you think the Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to and enrich discussion and action on the topic of gender activism today? Is there more we can do? What else should we post?

I think that the Shiloh Project makes a vital contribution. I believe that any young women nowadays delude themselves that the feminist battles have been won. I believe that most of women’s gains in bodily freedom and mobility and time at their own disposal have been gained by scientific advances, namely, the provision of simple and easy sanitary protection and choices of contraception. Both give women greater control and offer options that women may make for themselves. But the idea that men have ceded 50% of their power of the public spheres of action to women is risible. But then, it must be a daunting prospect to reduce one’s power in life to a half; only the very best of men seem to be capable of embracing that idea wholeheartedly. Hence the clear, unambiguous focus provided by the Shiloh Project cuts through the doublespeak that sugarcoats many unpleasant ‘pills’ of women’s life in the public sphere. The Shiloh Project must use its cutting edge to show women where their key vulnerabilities lie both here in the UK and globally.

In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?  

It is hard to be specific but, as you can see from my thoughts outlined above, these issues are always at the forefront of my mind. Memories well up of antenatal classes where the fathers were sometimes unwilling to massage their wives’ backs and/or bellies in the particular different ways that would alleviate their aches and pains, then, the transforming joy on their faces as their actions produced those relaxed sighs as pain receded and their partners’ faces melted into a gentle smile and look of love. I wish that change to happen also to the pains of the workplace and of other public spheres where partnership enriches rather than undercuts the common project.

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