gender differences in religious practice and significance.docVIP

Gender Differences in Religious Practice and Significance Linda Woodhead [12,789 words] For reasons which merit separate analysis, the Sociology of Religion has lagged behind many other fields in taking gender seriously. Whilst small-scale, ethnographic studies have been most likely to recognise the significance of gender, dominant theoretical frameworks within the Sociology of Religion often remain gender-blind. Although there has been some debate about why women, in the West at least, are more religious than men, this has largely taken place in isolation from what are still considered to be the ‘big’ issues in the sociological analysis of religion, most notably issues concerning the growth and decline of religion in modern societies. This inattention to gender contrasts with the liveliness of gender studies within the academy in recent decades. There have been a number of significant advances in theorising gender, most notably in three related areas. First, the idea that a distinction can be drawn between a biologically-given ‘sex’ and a socially-constructed ‘gender’ has been widely discredited. Historical studies like Laqueur (1990) demonstrate that sex is historically and culturally variable, with the modern idea of two separate sexes representing a shift away from the longer-established western view that there is a single male sex, of which the female is an inferior manifestation. The ‘sex and gender’ model has also been undermined by a model of sex/gender as produced in and by social processes and performances (Butler, 1999), or as a form of ‘social embodiment’ (Connell, 2002). The latter view stresses the mutual constitution of bodies and social processes, such that it is impossible to prise them apart, whilst the former tends to reduce the bodily to the social. Second, rejection of the ‘sex and gender’ model is bound up with a rejection of the idea that there are ‘two spheres’ of masculinity and femininity or male and female. Psychological research on sex