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Toward Men's Studies in Religion

4/02/2007 13:13:44

In the last week I got notice that I will be presenting in the Men's Studies in Religion Group at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) meeting later this year. Ever since I have voiced interest in doing work of this sort, a number of friends have given me funny looks. Studying men in religion? Haven't we had enough of that? Isn't that exactly the problem, that we have left women out? As I begin exploring this kind of thinking, I'd like to put forward a few initial justifications for it, reasons that a men's studies in religion is of crucial importance.

Men's studies in religion, first of all, has to be necessarily feminist. The pre-feminist language in so much religious studies was about "Man," neither man nor woman, and only presumably a generalizable human being. To begin talking about men now as only half of the species, as a particularity, could only happen after feminists called for the recognition of critical difference and made Man a misnomer. As in so many aspects of culture, feminist thinking has revealed the structures of patriarchy at work in religions, the transcendental superstructures that help to justify and maintain a generally patriarchal society. A men's studies in religion takes this as a starting point; but we need to go much further than simply making accusations and denunciations. The critique, rather, deserves a fuller explanation, both of the patriarchy we hope to leave behind (if possible) and where men will be left after the fact.

Religions, if the feminist allegations are true, offer tools for exploring more deeply the inner workings of patriarchy and the needs underlying it. If male-dominated religious discourses went about ignoring the experience of women, they have said a great deal about the experience of men, which we can reconstruct through the necessary translations that make, more or less directly, Man back into men. Why did/do men feel the need to establish and inhabit patriarchies? Can men be separated from patriarchy? What resources do religious traditions offer for alternative models of manhood?

To take an example. Recently I have been working through Nancy Jay's book from 1991, Throughout Your Generations Forever. Drawing on ethnography, ancient biblical texts, and post-Vatican II Catholicism, she argues that across cultures, sacrifice has been used as a vehicle for establishing an exclusively male lineage independent from being born of women. The priority of the Petrine priesthood in the Catholic Mass, for instance, ensures just this. Once initiated, men are spiritually reborn in this purified lineage, and the need for reference to women is further effaced.

Jay's is a suggestive, yet incomplete, account. She sets out to reveal "varied methods for silencing" women's voices and succeeds. But the reasons for silencing women in such strange, perverse ways is no more apparent to us. Here the discussion needs to turn more forthrightly to men, to (so to speak) the source.

Without men's studies, in some form or another, men have no response to feminism available except a renewed insistence on the old patriarchal structures. They would be left as the defining fact of male identity. As women insist on distinct, recognized identities as women, the question of men's identity implicitly becomes equally pressing. A men's studies, therefore, is what makes an inhabitable post-feminism possible. In the study of religion, where feminists have had such groundbreaking influence and insight, the need for it should be clear.

re:Toward Men's Studies in Religion - 4/02/2007 13:19:53
Posted by mary

gender gender!
who believes in gender?
i guess we all secretly do (though that's not true!)

thank you

re: - 4/06/2007 18:00:53
Posted by Eli

Awesome.

Your question, "Can men be separated from patriarchy?" is something that I return to every time I see men perpetrate something awful in "our" name, that is, in our gender, because of our gender. My gender, then, becomes a symbol (with varied meanings) to many. So I try to buck the trend and evince female qualities: interest in literature and public health, for example. ;) But I also use my gender for my advancement, in ways that wreak of old-time patriarchy. Speaking in a deep voice, for instance, helps me be authoritative when I want to be (or maybe just helps me *feel* authoritative), and it helps me relate to the prisoners I tutor, with their macho-ness.

I think it's curious that the AAR would create a separate section for Men's Studies, and not simply subsume it with Women's Studies under some generic name like Gender Studies. In any case, congrats on presenting a paper. Unfortunately, San Diego is not in my future. Nor London.

I think men have an important place - as men - in supporting and developing feminism, and I'm glad you're "man enough" not to shy away from it.

men's burdens - 10/23/2007 13:53:11
Posted by nathan

A couple articles suggesting, from an evolutionary point of view, the kinds of pressures that males experience and how behavior interacts with biological strategies:

The Economist reports that the demands of male sexual competition likely take years off male lives in many species.

In a talk at the American Psychological Association, Roy Baumeister similarly suggests that men's lives have been historically less valued than women's. While some men reproduce quite a lot, far more men than women don't reproduce at all.

To the question of patriarchy, these ideas suggest that the appearance of male oppression may be the biological by-product of cutthroat male-to-male competition.

re: Toward Men's Studies in Religion - 2/06/2010 21:18:17
Posted by go fuck yourself, feminist eunuch-male

"Men's studies in religion, first of all, has to be necessarily feminist."

No it doesn't. Men's studies in religion has to be necessarily NON-feminist or ANTI-feminist.

All feminist is about the denigration and nullification of the male experience. All feminism is about holding the male individual and experience as inferior to the female one.

You are a model citizen of the matriarchy; you have been trained well to spout the illogical bilge that you do.

re: Toward Men's Studies in Religion - 2/06/2010 21:20:02
Posted by gfy

"She sets out to reveal "varied methods for silencing" women's voices and succeeds. But the reasons for silencing women"

Feminism is the greatest silencer of sex of all.

It seeks in all cases and at all times to silence the male voice and male expression.

re: Toward Men's Studies in Religion - 2/06/2010 21:22:47
Posted by gfy

"In the study of religion, where feminists have had such groundbreaking influence and insight"

Feminists are incapable of insight, though their views have certainly had influence.

Myriad different ways of expressing female supriority, matriarchy, male inferioirity - the commandments of the movement - that is the only "insight" feminist has ever, and will ever, come up with.

The essence of feminism is variation on the theme of matriarchy and preference-towards-female.

That isn't insight, I'm sorry. That's repetitious, rigid ideology.

re: Toward Men's Studies in Religion - 2/06/2010 21:28:04
Posted by

"Can men be separated from patriarchy?"

The fact that women/feminists are still asking this question, with great frequency and seriousness, shows just how deep and unmovable feminism's misandry is.

"I think men have an important place - as men - in supporting and developing feminism, and I'm glad you're "man enough" not to shy away from it."

Quit being matronising to men and nillifying the male voice. Men do not need your approval or recommendations from you on how to behave.

The fact that you see men only as passive "followers" of a movement which hates them shows the extent of your bigotry. You see men in terms of women. You do not see men as free individuals who are entitled to their own beliefs.

The day bigots like you get your comeuppance will be a great day. Your self-righteous matronising passive-aggressive bilge has no place in a civil society.

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