Interaktionen, Diskurse und Materialitäten

Un/Doing Gender - Un/Doing Religion 

Interactions, Discourses and Materialities

Religion and gender are considered as two historically closely intertwined categories, the connection of which is currently politicised in public and controversial in everyday life. Both are of central use to mobilise socio-political agendas. Gender categories serve to defend or criticise patriarchal religious traditions and, conversely, religious traditions with their existential dimensions are part of the defence or criticism of hegemonic gender constellations. A joint research group of Practical Theologies (Islamic, Catholic, Protestant) and sociology is planned.

The group aims to trace the relationship between gender and religion back to an empirical question and investigate how religious and gender affiliations are established today. The realities of religious and gender practices and their mutual entanglements will be reconstructed within various social situations and contexts. We understand both gender and religion praxeologically as processual categories and historically situated knowledge formations that are actualised and expressed in interactions, discourses and materialities. The possibility of undoing as a staging of religious or gender indifference is considered, as is the actualisation of other social affiliations (e.g. ethnicity, age, sexual orientation). As part of the preparatory work, an interdisciplinary workshop funded by P4 “Global Encounters” at the University of Tübingen took place 16 to 18 June 2021.

Grant applicants are: Michael Schüssler (Practical Theology/Faculty of Catholic Theology), Fahimah Ulfat (Religious Education/Centre for Islamic Theology), Ursula Offenberger (Sociology/Focus on Methodology), and Birgit Weyel (Practical Theology/Faculty of Protestant Theology).