Deadline- 29th June 2012
The primary purpose of the workshop will be to identify strategic areas for future research in the area, contributing to the development and enrichment of the interdisciplinary study of religion and gender from the perspective of postcolonial theory and to create a network for future research collaboration and exchange.
Even a cursory review of literature in the field in the last decade reveals a startling absence of sustained reflection by R&G scholars on the implications that postcolonial theory might have for their theorizations of gendered practices, identifications, and discourses within religious traditions, or of the ways in which the field itself might require reformulation and revision in light of the compelling epistemological and ontological challenges posed to metropolitan academia by a variety of postcolonialisms. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the imperative question as to how ‘postcoloniality’ challenges, criticizes and moves forward discussions initiated by queer theory in relation to religion.
This workshop offers a timely, perhaps overdue, opportunity to (re)visit the question of the necessary triangulation of ‘religion’, ‘gender’ and ‘postcoloniality’ or, put differently, to pose the question of the necessity of thinking these categories together. As Derrida has put it, catachresis ‘concerns first the violent and forced, abusive inscription of a sign, the imposition of a sign upon a meaning which did not yet have its own proper sign in language. So much so that there is no substitution here, no transport of proper signs, but rather the irruptive extension of a sign proper to an idea, a meaning, deprived of their signifier. A “secondary” original”’ (This ‘secondary origin’ produces ‘a new kind of proper sense, by means of a catachresis whose intermediary status tends to escape the opposition of the primitive [sense] and the figurative [sense], standing between them as a “middle”’.
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