Special Introduction from the Religion and Politics Editor

Abstract

Entering the twenty-sixth year of producing first-rate feminist scholarship in religion is reason enough for celebration. With this issue, we have sweetened the occasion by assembling the range of sections for which the Journal has become famous—articles, poetry, roundtable, and review essay—and by formally introducing a new section entitled “Religion and Politics.” This section is dedicated to the task of unpacking the religious rhetorics and disciplinary practices (like “confession”) encoded in political speech and public policy. The editorial board of the JFSR is well aware that producing feminist scholarship in religion is a profoundly political act. Nonetheless, we are convinced that the contemporary intersections of religion and politics are both proliferating and particularly volatile. Many examples could be cited: the rising tide of “religious” violence; the expanding political valence of heterosexist, racist, and paternalist “family values” and “faith-based initiatives”; the curtailing of women’s access to birth control and safe abortion; the metastasizing surveillance of campus speech and dress; and the continuing pressures of migration and globalization, which expose women’s bodies to unmitigated violence, economic vulnerability, and the asymmetrical and unwieldy burdens of preserving cultural continuity and authenticity. These developments call for sophisticated, rigorous, and timely responses in the pages of this esteemed journal. The articles gathered here evidence the remarkable range of issues in the field as well as some persistent themes: the extraordinary and ambivalent power of women’s bodies in public, whether gaping, gazing, mourning, or nursing; the contextual, relational, and dynamic dimensions of feminist and womanist ethics; and the therapeutic and political valences of religious speech and ritual. In the first article, Rachel Muers outlines a feminist ethics of breast-feeding that directly challenges the individualization of the responsibility of feeding infants—a responsibility that is placed almost exclusively on the shoulders of the “total mother.” Muers calls on feminists to recognize breast-feeding as a significant human good, but, at the same time, cautions them as to how contemporary