Guest Editors: Jamie Pitts and Peter-Ben Smit
Description
The journal Religion and Gender invites article proposals for a special issue on Gendering Jesus. The status of Jesus’ gender has long been a topic of interest within various forms of Christianity, as well as in other religious traditions and non-religious worldviews and/or cultural traditions. For instance, defense of a male priesthood is sometimes linked to the need for clergy to “represent” the male Christ, and proponents of “muscular Christianity” look to Jesus as their rugged male hero, a true “man’s man.” A famous feminist syllogism picks up on this imagery to repudiate the traditional Christian doctrine of salvation on the grounds that a male savior can only save men. Alternatively, Jesus has been portrayed as the embodiment of a feminist-friendly masculinity or as paradigmatically combining masculine and feminine traits in religious and non-religious discourses alike. The incorporation of critical gender theory into biblical studies, religious studies and theology has led to an outpouring of scholarship on the topic, and recent writings variously interpret (representations of) Jesus as gender queer or hypermasculine or otherwise performing and presenting gender in notable ways.
In this special issue of Religion and Gender the guest editors invite contributions that explore different facets of Jesus’ gender and/or put the figure of Jesus into conversation with discourses about gender. Papers might, for instance, look at the presentation of Jesus as male and/or masculine in sacred texts (e.g., the New Testament or the Qur’an), investigate the reception history of Jesus’ masculinity, compare Jesus qua masculine protagonist or “hero” with other religious figures, study the masculine character of Jesus’ identity as conceived of within different religious traditions or world views (e.g., as savior, messiah, prophet, guru, Bodhisattva, or philosopher), or focus on interpretations and representations of Jesus “beyond masculinity,” e.g., in female or transgender ones. This list of topics is indicative, and contributions are invited from a variety of fields, religious traditions and beyond, and theoretical and methodological approaches. We specifically welcome contributions that foreground intersectionality, examining Jesus’ gender with other categories and perspectives such as embodiment, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and postcoloniality.
Submissions should be between 5000 and 8000 words in length (including abstract, footnotes and references). See the Journal’s page for further information about style guidelines. Affiliation and email address should be supplied in the first submission. In order to guarantee a blind review process, all submissions should be anonymized with the name of and references to the author removed from the text. We are happy to receive inquiries about prospective submissions.
Please send all queries to Jamie Pitts or Peter-Ben Smit.
Editors
Jamie Pitts is Associate Professor of Anabaptist Studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, director of Institute of Mennonite Studies, and editor of Anabaptist Witness. His research interests including the gendering of twentieth-century US Mennonite institutions and theology, historical connections between sexuality, colonialism, and Christian mission, and topics in constructive and political theologies. He is the author of Principalities and Powers: Revising John Howard Yoder’s Sociological Theology (Wipf and Stock 2013) and several articles in journals and edited volumes.
Peter-Ben Smit is Dom Helder Câmara Chair in Contextual Biblical Interpretation at the Faculty of Theology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, co-director of the Centre for Contextual Biblical Interpretation, and chair in Ancient Catholic Church Structures and the History and Doctrine of the Old Catholic Church at Utrecht University. He has a particular interest in early Christian views of gender and the use of such texts to argue for particular constructions of gender in history and today. Among his many publications are Masculinity and the Bible: Survey, Models, and Perspectives (Brill 2017) and, with Ovidiu Creanga, the edited volume Biblical Masculinity Foregrounded (Sheffield Phoenix 2014). He has also co-edited special issues of the journals Exchange and Journal of the Bible and Its Reception on religion and masculinity.
Plan
15 November 2018: invitation to submit a full-length manuscript
15 April 2019: manuscript submission deadline
15 May 2019: manuscript sent for external peer review
15 July 2019: reviewers’ comments sent to authors
15 September 2019: submission of revised manuscripts with letter to the editors
15 November 2019: special issue submitted to Journal
Posted on 19 Nov 2018
If you are interested in reviewing one of these books, please contact the book review editor An Van Raemdonck, anvanraemdonck@gmail.com or Jelle Wiering, J.O.Wiering@rug.nl
Publishers may send review copies to the address below.
Nella van den Brandt
Journal Religion and Gender
Departement of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Utrecht University
Janskerkhof 13
3512 BL Utrecht
The Netherlands
Posted on 04 Dec 2015
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Posted on 17 Sep 2015