This special issue is the result of concerns about the marginalized status of gender within the sociology of religion. The collection of exciting new research in this special issue advocates for the importance of a gender lens on questions of religion in order to highlight issues, practices, peoples, and theories that would otherwise not be central to the discipline. We encourage sociologists who study religion to engage more in interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship, acknowledge developments in the global South, and develop (...) more compelling theoretical frameworks that analyze religion from a gendered perspective. Our aim is to bring religion to the attention of gender and feminist scholars and to encourage religion scholars to consider gender not just as a variable but as a social structure. We hope that both groups of scholars will consider gender and religion as mutually constitutive social categories. (shrink)

Feminist sociologists claim that while feminist insights have been incorporated in sociological paradigms and women sociologists have been well-integrated into academia, sociological frameworks have not been transformed, a process known as the missing feminist revolution. Yet, few have examined how the missing feminist revolution operates in specific subdisciplines and the mechanisms that sustain it. This article undertakes these tasks by analyzing religion and gender scholarship published in six sociology journals over the past 32 years. We find evidence of partial integration (...) and continued marginalization. However, we also document disparate networks of interlocutors that operate in two distinct intellectual fields—religion and gender. We argue that this bifurcation partially explains the missing feminist revolution and that insularity of feminist conversations likely contributes to this process. Our findings shed light on obstacles to transforming mainstream disciplines. (shrink)

Sociological studies of women's experiences with conservative religions are typically framed by a paradox that ponders women's complicity. The prevailing view associates agency with strategic subjects who use religion to further extra-religious ends and pays little attention to the cultural and institutional contexts that shape “compliance.” This paper suggests an alternative framing. Rather than asking why women comply, I examine agency as religious conduct and religiosity as a constructed status. Drawing on a study that examined how orthodox Jewish Israeli women (...) observe, negotiate, and make sense of regulations of marital sexuality, this paper explains religious women's agency as religious conduct, or the “doing” of religion. I demonstrate that doing religion is associated with a search for authentic religious subjecthood and that religiosity is shaped in accordance with the logics of one's religion, and in the context of controlling messages about threatened symbolic boundaries and cultural Others. (shrink)