Gender and culture: challenges to the sociology of religion

In Zaretsky's view, the post-structuralist stance produced what he calls theories of non-identity (1994:211). Identity politics then, helped to produce theory in Cultural Studies that speaks not of persons and selves, but rather of locations and subject positions. Thus, for example, discourse theory posits that culture is composed of "subject positions," not individuals. It challenges the assumption, central to modernist thought, that in each of us there is an underlying person who is the same across different contexts. In this formulation, the opposition between the individual and society disappears.

The contribution of the French philosopher and sociohistorical analyst Michel Foucault to theoretical movements associated with the linguistic turn is also important here. Foucault rejected the idea of modern individual autonomous selves in conflict with society. This meant that he also rejected ideas such as repression and alienation, which start from the premise of such a conflict. Foucault (1979) saw knowledge as intimately bound up with discipline, rather than with freedom or liberation as the Enlightenment philosophers believed. Through studies of prisons, schools, and hospitals, he examined how discursive practices work to produce order in modernity. In his studies of the confessional and psychoanalysis (1978), he argued that even in the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives, in our sexuality, for example, we observe and discipline ourselves through our participation in discourses that organize our thought and action. Discipline works not through constraining individuals and their actions but by producing them. For Foucault, there is no single power structure operating outside of individuals. Rather, he saw modern human beings as self-observing subjects. In his understanding, the older distinction between a powerful external social order (society) and an autonomous, perhaps resisting, self does not hold.

Foucault conceptualized society as separated into a plurality of power strategies, discourses, and practices, all of which intersect, succeed one another, and are distinguished by the type of discursive formation to which they pertain and by their degree of intensity, but not by their relation to any totality. For Foucault, there is no essential self that can be liberated by either therapy or revolution.

Coming from somewhat different bases the feminist theorists and the poststucturalists offer ideas about identity and the self that reject the binary opposition between self and society. Once we look at selves as relational rather than essential, then structure and agency can be imagined as mutually constitutive rather than as opposed (Giddens 1984; Sewell 1992; Emirbayer 1997; Emirbayer and Mische 1998). We can also begin to understand more clearly the ways that culture itself is structuring (Kane 1991; Hays 1994). Gender and sexuality can be looked at as relational, not as categorical: we can examine how identities are performed in social contexts (Butler 1990).