This article explores the notion of gender overdetermination in relation to a community of criminalised women in Massachusetts. Re-examining classic writings on overdetermination by Louis Althusser, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, we query the notion of gender overdetermination and posit it as an effective lens for thinking about the persistence of gender as a social construct. The combination of the structural processes of overdetermination with the discursive and ideological power of overdetermination complicates and reduces possibilities and effectiveness of (...) sustained acts of resistance. The criminalised women of our study permanently inhabit a space in which aetiology, practice, discipline and interpretation are all hyper-gendered, meaning that acts of resistance are construed as more evidence of inescapable and essential gender identity. (shrink)

This article presents a cross-cultural exploration of the interaction between religion and family in the lives of women. It focuses on elderly Middle Eastern Jewish women who, during the course of their life spans, moved from a conflicting to a complementary experience of family and religion. The author argues that opposition between religion and family seldom arises for women who control their own time or resources, or who control a domestic sphere they themselves see as sacred. Women who wish to (...) conduct their religious lives in the public sphere, especially in the context of an extrafamilial hierarchy or as religious professionals, are likely to come into conflict with their families over issues of competition for their time or allegiance. Official religious doctrines are not likely to determine how particular women experience family and religion; even women who maneuver within the same theological framework may experience the relationship between family and religion in very different ways. (shrink)

All known women's religions provide transient help for specific women. Some women's religions also affect, or at least work toward, permanent and structural advantages to women as a group. A variety of factors explain these two models. Those women's religions that offer long-term collective betterment for women tend to be situated in societies in which women form ongoing “sisterhoods,” in which women have autonomy regarding their own sexuality and fertility, and in which women control significant economic resources. Moreover, these religions (...) tend to elaborate and institutionalize gender as a cultural category. Women's religions that provide only short-term and individual assistance tend to attract women through illness and to emphasize spirit possession rituals. (shrink)