Laurel Zwissler
Laurel Zwissler is Professor of Religion at Central Michigan University, USA, affiliate faculty in Women and Gender Studies. Her book, Religious, Feminist, Activist: Cosmologies of Interconnection (University of Nebraska, Anthropology of North America Series), focuses on global justice activists and investigates contemporary intersections between religion, gender, and politics, relating these to theoretical debates about religion in the public sphere. She is now building on this work with ethnographic research within the North American fair-trade movement, as well as occasional visits with contemporary Witchcraft communities.
She serves as co-editor of the journal Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft with U Penn, https://magic.pennpress.org/home/
and as co-editor of the book series Gendering the Study of Religion in the Social Sciences, with Routledge https://www.routledge.com/Gendering-the-Study-of-Religion-in-the-Social-Sciences/book-series/GSRSS.
Please feel free to get in touch about the journal or the book series.
She serves as co-editor of the journal Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft with U Penn, https://magic.pennpress.org/home/
and as co-editor of the book series Gendering the Study of Religion in the Social Sciences, with Routledge https://www.routledge.com/Gendering-the-Study-of-Religion-in-the-Social-Sciences/book-series/GSRSS.
Please feel free to get in touch about the journal or the book series.
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Monograph by Laurel Zwissler
In Religious, Feminist, Activist, Laurel Zwissler investigates the political and religious identities of women who understand their social-justice activism as religiously motivated. Placing these women in historical context as faith-based activists for social change, this book discusses what their activities reveal about the public significance of religion in the pluralistic context of North America and in our increasingly globalized world. Zwissler’s ethnographic interviews with feminist Catholics, Pagans, and United Church Protestants reveal radically different views of religious and political expression and illuminate how individual women and their communities negotiate issues of personal identity, spirituality, and political responsibility.
Articles by Laurel Zwissler
The spiritual marketplace (Roof 1993) is one result of particular conceptions of secularism, in which religious participation becomes optional and specific religions are personal choices. Further, bricolage spirituality is grounded in ideas of consumption as liberating and a sign of personal agency. In North American public space hard-policed tensions between secularity and religion in the public sphere nonetheless allow a third category of “spirituality” to flourish. The category of spirituality highlights the fuzziness of the public/private split and ambivalences about where religion is supposed to fall in the divide. In the West, the division historically relegated all non-economic transactions to the private, the traditionally feminine domain. Yet the market also intervenes in intimacies, with domestic consumption symbolizing care-taking and affective attachment to family, that is, women’s moral value. The double edged messages of domestic consumption as a moral virtue and as frivolous, even corrupting in its required engagement with the outside world, create a historically familiar problem for women, caught in the middle as conduits between the public, in this case the market, and the private, in this case home and heart.
This project brings analysis of these historical trends together with field-work on a major fair-trade organization in the USA and Canada that works with volunteers, predominantly women. I investigate how participants negotiate between their loyalty to the Christian group who founded the project and their desire to compete in a secularized retail market. In this struggle, the language of spirituality serves both to present the stores and their household items to customers as non-religious, and to justify this presentation as nonetheless faithful to the original religious roots of the fair-trade project. Spirituality becomes an attempt to promote gendered ethical values, originally grounded in a particular religious community, as universal.
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss3/6
Reviews by Laurel Zwissler
In Religious, Feminist, Activist, Laurel Zwissler investigates the political and religious identities of women who understand their social-justice activism as religiously motivated. Placing these women in historical context as faith-based activists for social change, this book discusses what their activities reveal about the public significance of religion in the pluralistic context of North America and in our increasingly globalized world. Zwissler’s ethnographic interviews with feminist Catholics, Pagans, and United Church Protestants reveal radically different views of religious and political expression and illuminate how individual women and their communities negotiate issues of personal identity, spirituality, and political responsibility.
The spiritual marketplace (Roof 1993) is one result of particular conceptions of secularism, in which religious participation becomes optional and specific religions are personal choices. Further, bricolage spirituality is grounded in ideas of consumption as liberating and a sign of personal agency. In North American public space hard-policed tensions between secularity and religion in the public sphere nonetheless allow a third category of “spirituality” to flourish. The category of spirituality highlights the fuzziness of the public/private split and ambivalences about where religion is supposed to fall in the divide. In the West, the division historically relegated all non-economic transactions to the private, the traditionally feminine domain. Yet the market also intervenes in intimacies, with domestic consumption symbolizing care-taking and affective attachment to family, that is, women’s moral value. The double edged messages of domestic consumption as a moral virtue and as frivolous, even corrupting in its required engagement with the outside world, create a historically familiar problem for women, caught in the middle as conduits between the public, in this case the market, and the private, in this case home and heart.
This project brings analysis of these historical trends together with field-work on a major fair-trade organization in the USA and Canada that works with volunteers, predominantly women. I investigate how participants negotiate between their loyalty to the Christian group who founded the project and their desire to compete in a secularized retail market. In this struggle, the language of spirituality serves both to present the stores and their household items to customers as non-religious, and to justify this presentation as nonetheless faithful to the original religious roots of the fair-trade project. Spirituality becomes an attempt to promote gendered ethical values, originally grounded in a particular religious community, as universal.
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol22/iss3/6