This blog post also serves as the introduction to Political Theology 25.6, a special issue on “(How to Do) Political Theology Without Men?” now online.
This special issue was conceived during the hey-day of COVID-19, when the implications of the pandemic on academia began to unfold. Among the many disruptions the coronavirus introduced to our professional lives, it was impossible to ignore the fact that it pushed women further out of knowledge production; less and less women submitted articles to peer-reviewed journals, and even less persevered until publication.1 “I am not exaggerating when I say that almost all of the article submissions I received in the time of the pandemic have come from men,” wrote Andrea Jain, the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in May of 2020 in her “plea for our discipline in the time of pandemic.”2
Certainly, the disparities which appeared during the pandemic have only deepened the long standing inequitable gendered division of labor in academia. A number of studies point to how “women take care of the academic family,” doing significantly more academic service to their institutions – or, as one op-ed put it, “women do higher ed’s chores.”3 Women are also far likelier to have heavier teaching loads, making up the majority of non-tenure-track lecturers and instructors but only 44% of tenure-track faculty (not to mention that women make less than men across all ranks).4 Not only do women do more academic chores, they tend to do more chores domestically as well.5 And while gender-neutral family-friendly policies have been much welcomed, studies have shown that such policies tend to benefit men in academia, and have had “an unintended negative impact on women.”6 All of this academic service, teaching, and domestic service unsurprisingly impedes research and writing, one of the most significant determinants of career advancement in academia. The pandemic has exacerbated this disparity across a wide range of academic disciplines.7
The journal of Political Theology has also been affected by these trends. Regardless of the inclusive aspirations of its editors, the journal remained as male-dominated as others. At the end of 2020, the stage was entirely male dominated – the final two issues of that initial pandemic year have no articles by women or non-binary scholars.8 This state of affairs has energized a series of changes and initiatives in the journal, this issue among them, as well as the creation of a more diverse editorial board and a constant effort on the side of the editors to solicit articles authored by women.
As these trends continued into 2021, we – both of us scholars of political theology who identify as (cisgender) women – began wondering whether this cross-disciplinary disparity intersected with our own field in ways that went beyond the quantity of submissions from women or non-binary people. Has there been something fundamental to political theology that has made it a more convenient environment for men, and less so for women and non-binary people? What specific concepts, intellectual structures and paradigmatic convictions have made this specific field such a manly business? And what should be done in order to imagine political theologies which are not bound to this persistent dominance?
These questions were the impetus behind this special issue. In interrogating “(how to do) political theology without men,” as the special issue is titled, we have defined two distinct yet interrelated aims – the first of which is concrete and the other abstract.
On the concrete level, we sought to propose at least a preliminary practical corrective to the growing absence of women and non-binary people in political theology. Our aim was to counter the male dominance of the field by carving a space for women and non-binary people to do political theology without having to compete with the more privileged gender in the field. To achieve that goal, the special issue was intended to increase the quantity of essays by non-men in the journal, as well as encourage junior scholars who may have experienced the effect of the pandemic on their academic work more gravely than their seniors. Additionally, we decided that no men would be involved in the production of the special issue – no male authors, no male peer reviewers, no male book reviewers, no male-authored books reviewed, and so on.9 Our methodological decisions, as will be discussed below, proved to be the most difficult to adhere to, the most costly in terms of the production process, yet also the most revealing with regards to the material and social conditions that make academic publishing so much more difficult for women.
Second, we were deeply curious about the effects of that concrete restriction that we imposed on the discourse. What, if anything, happens to the discourse if, as in a controlled experiment, you remove one of its core elements? Does political theology behave differently without men? What kinds of inquiries or insights might emerge? What kinds of inquires or insights might, for better or for worse, recede? The question – “(How to do) political theology without men?” – is precisely that, a question that this issue creatively and critically interrogates through experimentation, rather than a goal that it is pursuing.
We would like to stress: this special issue does not suggest separatism as a viable, let alone desirable, outcome, nor does it endorse inclusion as a sufficient strategy. We are under no illusion that gender inequity in the field could (or should) be solved by either removing men from or by adding more women and non-binary people into the conversation, as if it was merely a kind of epistemological imbalance that could easily be recalibrated (and gender itself an uncontested given). If, however, gender inequity is understood as an intractable sociopolitically-sanctioned set of power relations, rooted in and fueled by discursively and socially constructed norms (that, in turn, produce our understanding of what gender is), the concrete restriction we work with here cannot provide a “solution.” What it can offer, however, is a method to manipulate the discourse and encourage a self-reflective inquiry of the “problem.” In other words, we sought to avoid falling prey to a kind of inversion of what Alfred North Whitehead referred to as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness – in this case – a fallacy of misplaced abstraction: mistaking the concrete for something abstract.10 Rather, political theology without men set the conditions for exploration. What might be discovered or revealed if there was a concrete change in journal authorship for an issue? What can this experiment tell us about the norm, and can it lead to further experimentation?
The articles in the special issue have addressed the questions we set out to investigate from a variety of perspectives. Some of the essays critique the foundational concepts of political theology and surface the sources of gender inequality and sexism in political-theological thought. Other essays disregard or bypass existing obstacles and simply theologize politically, or politicize theologically, examining a variety of intersections between politics, theology, and gender across diverse disciplines, including law, philosophy, theology, Jewish studies, literature and political science. Finally, some of the authors have used the venue to turn their critical gaze towards the very idea of (doing) political theology without men, inviting us to test the limits of our exercise.
In her essay “The Could-Have-Been Lives of Political Theology: An Ode to Miscarried Knowings,” Hilary Jerome Scarsella explores the question of how political theology remains so manly by considering the “mechanics” that contribute to the male ethos of the field, arguing “that political theology’s male ethos is sustained, to a large extent, through the mundane inner workings of guild structures and scholarly interactions” (3). Turning to the metaphor of miscarriage as an analytic framework, Scarsella offers three autoethnographic case studies that examine how the male ethos of the field causes it “to function as a hostile gestational environment for gendered ideas” (9). Scarsella’s analysis highlights quotidian and subtle norms, discourses, and doxa that perpetuate the male ethos of political theology.11
Meirav Jones traces the roots of political theology’s excessive manliness in the reigning vision of sovereignty in political theological thought as marked by domination, an inheritance of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. Jones argues that if, as argued by Carl Schmitt, “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” then we must diversify our theological imagery in order to open up our political horizons.12 Leaning mostly on Jewish feminist writings and recent trans theologies, Jones proposes alternative theological concepts that may challenge male domination, enrich and diversify our understanding of sovereignty.
Whereas Jones queers Hobbes’ Leviathan and destabilizes political theology’s presumptions about sovereignty, Clare Woodford purports to queer the foundational narrative of Christianity. In her essay “Queer Madonnas, Nonviolence, and the Macho Christian Right; or: How to Do Mariology without Men,” Woodford explores the “radical absence of normative Man” from the Christian family, and thus from Christianity’s most fundamental idea of relationships (2). Employing Adriana Cavarero’s invocation of the Madonna together with queer and non-dominant indigenous Mariologies, she proposes a novel interpretation of the Christian love of enemies, one that counters the “alliance between Conservative Christianity and the radical right politics” (1).
While Jones’ and Woodford’s essays focus their analysis on foundational themes in political theology – sovereignty and violence – Carmen Dege and Elisabeth Antus (and also, to a certain degree, Yosefa Raz) turn to emotions as a critical lens for examining the field’s weaknesses and as a powerful engine to drive political theology in new directions. In “Of Monsters and Men,” Antus reclaims the much rejected and criticized emotion of shame, pointing to how it can be transformative towards unlearning habits of patriarchal violence. Antus maintains that it is not sufficient to merely identify how such violence is linked with shame “and then stamp out this emotion.” Rather, she contends, we “need a feminist, political, and theological approach that attends to the lessons shame may offer” (3).
Dege points out a “positive turn” towards anger in political thought, a turn which “has been entirely initiated by female thinkers and writers” such as Audre Lorde, Myisha Cherry, Amia Srinivasan, bell hooks, Agnes Callard, María Lugones and Simone Weil (2). Dege analyses the transition of anger’s place in political thought from its traditional (and predominantly male) philosophical perception as a source of violence, an impetus for revenge, and an expression of moral inferiority, to an understanding of “anger as essential knowledge, anger as apt response, and anger as feminist attention,” which puts vulnerability rather than sovereignty at the center of political and ethical life (2).
Yosefa Raz explores the transformative, even healing, powers of wrath and lament in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!. Philip’s book-length poem grapples with the 1781 massacre in which the owners of a slave ship threw enslaved Africans overboard in order to claim insurance compensation. Philip uses the protocols of the trials that followed the Zong massacre in order to create the poem’s disruptive language, what Raz reads as a prophetic annunciation; as Ezekiel revives the “dry bones” of the dead, so Philip gathers up the wet bones of the dead Africans from the waters. Examining Philip’s poem against the backdrop of modern poetry, where prophetic speech has often been propelled to express a “national spirit” and accompany processes of nation building, Raz shows how Philip turns prophecy against nation-building and uses its wrathful voice to deconstruct the national spirit, and indeed, to dismember the English language itself – just as the English language was used to dismember the bodies and the memories of the Africans its speakers had enslaved.
Three articles invite us to reconsider our enchantment by the idea of doing political theology without men, or indeed, of doing anything without them. Turning to literary analysis as both a site of critique and resource, Zahiye Kundos reads Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy through the figure of Amina, the mother of the Jawādī family in colonial Cairo. Seemingly a marginal figure in the trilogy, Kundos problematizes Mahfouz’s orientalist characterization of Amina as a prototype of a docile Muslim woman, blindly devout, ignorant and oppressed under a tyrannic patriarchy. As if hijacking Amina from the hands of Mahfouz, Kundos tells Amina’s story through the crumbling of her ties to the men in her life, and most prominently to her sons – of whom one, Fahmy, dies as a shahid in the struggle against British colonialism, while the other, Kamāl, becomes himself Westernized and secularized and closes himself to her. Amina’s loss, so Kundos, could be read as a metaphor for the blocking of the air-tubes which could have enabled a more breathing relationship between the Islamic tradition and modernity. Kundos points to the grave costs that Muslim women had to pay for what was often defined as their “liberation,” a Western construct which cannot be disentangled from colonialism, violent modernization and extensive secularization.
Yofi Tirosh draws on feminist critiques to analyze the way in which the liberal concept of “consent” is propelled to justify a growing toleration of liberal legal systems towards inegalitarian norms discriminating against women, when such toleration is required to ensure minority rights. Focusing on Israeli law as its case study, Tirosh shows how the explicit “consent” of individual religious women to situations of segregation from men is used to enforce, and even expand inegalitarian practices that overflow from the private into the public sphere and blur the distinctions between them. Consent, Tirosh argues, disregards the depth of entanglement of the individual in her inegalitarian society and the almost impossibility of activating her “right to exit.” Tirosh shows how “the right to exist” is yet another liberal concept which, along with “consent” ends up subverting under the core principles of the liberal legal system. She reminds us that “separate but equal” cannot but be a discriminatory policy, along gender lines just as along racial ones.
Finally, Mary Nickel directly challenges the desirability of an exercise such as ours, posing the crucial question whether a world without men is theologically and politically helpful, and for what? Nickel explores a myriad of non-men worlds in contemporary literature and film, identifying the idea of doing away with men as a central fantasy in the quest for overcoming patriarchy. Conversely, going back to Paul’s statement that there is “no woman without man” and “no man without woman (1 Corinthians 11),” Nickel argues for the theological need of “gender-diversity inclusive of men,” rather than the total exclusion of one gender for the purpose of elevating the others, which risks at perpetuating inequality rather than solving it. “The utopian longing for independent, self-sufficient reproduction,” Nickel argues, “can induce us to overlook the degree to which we need others, including especially those who are not like us” (17).
Two book reviews that speak to the diversity of the field are also included in this special issue. Laura Simpson reviews Rachel Ellis’ In This Place Called Prison: Women’s Religious Life in the Shadow of Punishment, and Elisabeth Becker Topkara reviews Esra Özyürek’s Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Post-War Germany.
What, then, were we able to learn from the absence of men in political theology? On the concrete level, the absence of men from the process of production significantly complicated it, while at the same allowing space for the exploration of uncommon academic practices, as well as provoking pathbreaking insights. In retrospect, we can confirm that the exclusion of men from the special issue has considerably slowed the process of production. Deadlines have continued to be extended, missed, and extended again, for us and for the contributors, due to major medical emergencies and family crises, the direct and indirect impacts of war, career changes and moves, and more (indeed, it might be worth asking whether female scholars tend to separate less between the personal and the professional than men. Or, perhaps it is only us). These issues are not gender-specific, but as many of us bear significant domestic and parental responsibilities, as well as significant teaching and academic service responsibilities, that impact has been especially tangible.
Moreover, with this special issue, we have experienced the much lamented “peer-reviewer crisis” firsthand.13 In fact, given that we were working with a much smaller pool of potential reviewers – who were already overtaxed and overworked with academic service responsibilities – the referee crisis was ever more tangible. On average, for the articles reviewed for this special issue, we received over five declines or non-responses before receiving two yeses. This, of course, slowed things even more.
The slowness of the process, however, has provoked for us a key revelation: if individuals and institutions truly want to support gender equity in academic research and publishing, we need to support a slower timetable for publishing (and we are grateful to the editors of Political Theology having done just that for this special issue). That certainly goes against the prevailing ethos of the neoliberal academy, and there are assuredly forces that will prevent it from becoming a norm, but nevertheless, creating opportunities for “slow scholarship,” is, as geographer Alison Mountz and others have suggested, indeed a vital tactic for a feminist politics of resistance.14
Slow as it may have been, were we able to complete our experiment and not involve men in the production of the special issue? Yes and no. Yes, all of the articles and book reviews (and books reviewed) that comprise this issue were authored by women, and all of the peer-reviews were by women or non-binary scholars. That being said, Dave True and Vincent Lloyd created the conditions of possibility for the special issue’s long pregnancy; and a year into the project, our purist resolution was pushed aside by an urgent need for administrative help, a need fulfilled by Political Theology’s managing editor, Jacques Linder. Moreover, our own lives are personally, professionally, and intellectually entangled with the lives of not a few men – partners, colleagues, fathers, students, sons, etc. At times, it was much easier to do political theology without men with these men, who often supported our work and carried some of the life-load with us.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the insights invoked in the special issue resist any homogeneous theoretical constructs or conclusions. Notwithstanding the few thematic common denominators mentioned above, the nine authors who contributed articles to this special issue, all women (we received no submissions from non-binary people – an interesting fact in its own right), have responded to its core question in extremely different ways. They have leaned on and grappled with different religious and secular traditions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Shamanism), and with liberal and post-liberal political visions, from and in conversation with the diverse geopolitical contexts (mainly in the West and in the Middle East) in which they work and think. This diversity was facilitated by the (temporary) exclusion of men from political theology, yet, at one and the same time, it also enabled the authors to challenge the homogeneous nature of the issue’s exclusionary exercise. In other words, the issue has amended the structural imbalance in the field by temporarily creating an alternative hegemony that has an abundance of space, possibilities, and routes of self-expression; yet as dominant discourse, the authors immediately began to explore the limitations of this temporary hegemony. Political theology without men turned out to be an extremely critical endeavor – of politics, theology, men, academic culture, legal systems, devotional practices, and even its own methodological pursuits and presumptions, while at the same time warning against the excessiveness of the critical gaze itself. Through that critical, as well as creative and constructive engagement, the authors have created – or have surfaced – an inherent knot between political theology and questions of gender and sexuality, which surpasses and complicates the visible fact of the field’s obvious manliness.
1. There is a lack of data on the impact of Covid-19 on the publication rates of non-binary people. It is known, however, that non-binary folks are especially underrepresented and face discrimination in the publication process. See Bancroft et al., “Promoting equity in the peer review”; Silbiger and Stubler, “Unprofessional peer reviews disproportionately.”
2. Jain, “An Update on Journal Publishing.” See also Flaherty, “No Room of One’s Own,” which Jain cites; Squazzoni et al. “Gender gap in journal submissions”; Clark, “How pandemic publishing struck.”
3. Guarino and Borden, “Faculty Service Loads and Gender”; Mayo, “Women Do Higher Ed’s Chores.”
4. American Association of University Professors, “The Annual Report.” The data points to an even more grim reality for women of color, with regards to rank, salary, and academic teaching and service responsibilities. See Turner, “Women of Color in Academe”; O’Meara et al. Equity-Minded Faculty Workloads; Hirshfield and Joseph, “‘We need a woman.”
5. See Fry et al. “In a Growing Share of U.S. Marriages”; Brenan, “Women Still Handle Main.”; Miller, “Nearly Half of Men.”
6. Wolfers, “A Family-Friendly Policy.” See also Morgan et al. “The unequal impact of parenthood.”
7. Shalaby et al, “Gender, COVID, and Faculty Service.”
8. Between 2020 and August of 2024 (volumes 21-25.4), of the 138 articles published in this journal, 89 (64%) have been by men. Of the 65 books reviews within that time span, 43 reviews (66%) were written by men, and 44 of the books reviewed (68%) were authored by men. The overwhelming majority of guest editorials and introductions were also by men (77%). Notably, of the 103 publications classified as essays or conversations, or as part of a book symposium or round table, 49 were by men – a slight minority (48%). To the best of our knowledge, among the range of publications over this time span, only two articles and two essays published were by scholars who identify as non-binary. It is important to note that this data does not distinguish between submitted and solicited articles.
9. In addition to the gendered disparity in publication submission and acceptance rates, women are cited less than men in academic publications across a range of fields, and a number of studies have highlighted various ways sexism and misogyny impact the peer-review process. See for instance: Ali and Serrano, “The Person of the Author”; Hagemann, “Why does gender inequality?”; Fahim, “The Great Imbalance.” For an especially ironic example of sexism in the peer-review process, see Else, “‘Sexist’ peer review causes.”
10. See Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 51ff.
11. For more on doxa, see especially Vásquez, More Than Belief; Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice. For a helpful summary of doxa and its use for political theology, see Menghini, “Doxa.”
12. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.
13. See, for instance, Flaherty, “The Peer-Review Crisis”; Troponi et al. “Time to rethink academic publishing”; Curria, “The Referee Crisis.”
14. Mountz et al. “For Slow Scholarship.” See also Karkov, ed. Slow Scholarship.
