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Gender and culture: challenges to the sociology of religion

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2004 by Mary Jo Neitz

The cultural turn has had an enormous impact in sociology. While few sociologists have embraced the radical postmodernisms of Baudrillard (1988), or Lyotard (1979), the attention to language, discourse and text common to a broad array of post-structuralist thinkers (Derrida 1987; Foucault 1978, 1979; Geertz 1973) has provided a useful challenge to sociology and provided new ways of thinking about some of the persistent problems in our field. Rather than seeing the cultural turn as foreshadowing the end of sociology as we know it, I see the writings of particular authors as a productive challenge that can help us in the sociology of religion do what we do better. In particular, I argue that the movement away from binary categories leads to a more relational conceptualization of the self, and combined with ideas about discourse and text, this thinking about relationality leads to an exploration of narrativity both as a representational mode and as a social epistemology. I see these aspects of the cultural turn occurring alongside (a) the political activism associated with what have come to be called the new social movements, and (b) the development of similar ideas among feminist scholars. Much of this article will sketch the congruences between feminist theories and methodologies and certain aspects of the cultural turn. I will say less about how gender and sexuality are at the core of religious identification and practice, having developed that argument in other places, especially my writings on neo-pagans and witches (e.g. Neitz 2000).

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RELATIONAL SELVES: MOVING BEYOND BINARY OPPOSITIONS

Sociological categories developed in conjunction with grand narratives that attempted to explain modernity in terms of its contrast with prior societies conceived as traditional or primitive. Some central sociological categories were posed as binary oppositions, including the following: individual/society; agency/structure; culture/structure; ideal/material; sacred/secular; private/public; female/male; homosexual/heterosexual. Sociological theorists attempting to articulate a new cultural sociology are now suggesting ways of thinking that move beyond these binaries. I start with an explication of the first: individual/society.

Sociologists often lament the individualism of modern society (and of people in the United States, the culture where these characteristics of modern life are most fully embodied). Yet, at the same time, most mainstream sociological theory has taken for granted an understanding of the modern person as an autonomous individual. The notion of the modern person as a separate and autonomous individual is central to political theorists from Thomas Hobbes in seventeenth-century England to the contemporary philosopher John Rawls (1971). Social contract theory--from Hobbes to Rawls--is based upon a set of premises about the actions of free and autonomous men. It is not surprising to find these premises in the economic modeling of rational choice theory. Yet critical theories, including Marxism and psychoanalytic theory, also posit an individual radically separated--alienated from or in conflict with--society. The structure/agency dilemma, central to much sociological theorizing in the last decades of the 20th century, rests on this fundamental assumption of the opposition between the individual and society.

New Social Movements and Identity Politics

One impetus for the opening to new theories of action and identity has been the emergence of new kinds of social movements, beginning in the 1960s. While perhaps less unique than was first thought, these "new social movements" and their practices had ramifications for theories about identity. Hobbes' social contract theory imagined self-interested individuals. The French Enlightenment went a step further, positing these self-interested individuals as driven to repel the forces of authority--the church, the family, and the state--in the name of freedom from domination. The movement into modern society was imagined as a move away from tradition and constraint and toward freedom. The social movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries primarily organized people around the issues of class and nation, with the European labor movement being perhaps the prototypical social movement. These movements were never as strong in the United States as in Europe (Sombart 1976), but they did provide a paradigmatic set of cases for social-movement theorists, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

The new social movements, in contrast, have incorporated a broad definition of politics, extending cultural issues into public arenas to an extent much greater than did the class politics at the heart of the Marxist left. They often organize around categorical features of individuals. Black, feminist and gay liberation movements and the Greens have fought legal battles for rights, but they also have advocated and carried out various kinds of cultural politics. For example, the famous Miss America protest of 1970 was a media event, addressing a cultural issue--appearance norms for women--in a cultural mode. In the new social movements, groups of people who previously felt marginal to the system joined together on the basis of shared identity to pursue goals that are often defined as expressive or self-actualizing.

Gender and culture: challenges to the sociology of religion

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2004 by Mary Jo Neitz

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