Religion, politics and gender

Gender is at the heart of religion and politics, yet marginalized within religion and politics as separate academic fields as well as within studies that bring these two fields together. Indeed, gender is rarely mentioned in major books on religion and politics (see, for instance, the Routledge series ‘Studies in Religion and Politics’ and the Palgrave Macmillan series ‘Culture and Religion in International Relations’). The field of religion and politics thus mirrors other fields of study when it comes to the relative marginalization of gender. When gender is examined, it is via studies that focus explicitly and often exclusively on the role of gender in religion and politics, such as the edited volume by Bayes and Tohidi, which analyses ‘the politics of women’s rights in Catholic and Muslim contexts’, ¹ along with more recent edited volumes by Cady and Fessenden ² and Reilly and Scriver ³ which both address the religion-secularism-gender equality nexus in different contexts. Other works, including those by Scott, ⁴ and Rosenberger and Sauer, ⁵ discuss a single topic such as the politicization of the Muslim headscarf.