The Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture seeks submissions for a special issue with the theme “Engendering Nature.” This issue will explore the relationships between gender, nature, and the affective, spiritual, and religious dimensions of human experience.
More specifically, we seek analyses of how religion, gender, and nature are constructed and entangled; that engage with gendered eco-essentialisms positing gendered affinities with nature (as in some forms of ecofeminism, ecomaternalism, ecowomanism, feminist ethics of care, and goddess spiritualities). We are also interested in papers that analyze specific examples of women who work in and with nature, highlighting their personal relationships and philosophies with their environments.
The specific questions we would like to explore include, but are not limited to:
- How are religion, gender, and nature constructed and entangled?
- How have gendered essentialisms, which have typically posited that women have some kind of unique affinity with nature — and are found in some forms of ecofeminism, ecomaternalism, ecowomanism, feminist ethics, and earth-based spiritualities — fared in scholarly and popular discourses?
- In what ways, if any, do the natural sciences illuminate the ways in which gender is understood and contested?
- What, if anything, is the role of gender/nature in defining what is nature/gender?
- Can nature/gender be classified as products of culture and religion? If so, how?
- How have feminist and queer theory viewed and debated the gender/religion/nature nexus?
- Is the denigration of gender-fluidity and the denigration of nature connected, and if so how?
- What would queering nature entail, and likewise, what would it mean to naturalize queerness?
- Is Ecofeminism restricted by its perpetuation of romanticized ideals and binary models, and if so how/why?
- Have androcentrism, heteronormativity, patriarchal religious ideologies, and/or capitalism affected women’s work with nature, and if so how?
Interested authors should send an abstract (150 words) and proposal (500 words) as a single PDF, complete with author information and affiliated institution, for peer review to the special issue editors Tom Berendt (tom.berendt@temple.edu) and Amanda Nichols (amnv22@ufl.edu), by March 1, 2019.
Authors will be notified by April 1, 2019 whether their proposals have been accepted, and full-length manuscripts will be due by July 1, 2019. All manuscripts will undergo JSRNC’s full editorial review process, including double blind peer review, before publication. See the JSRNC website here for more details.