Gender, Dress and Religion: Contexts and Configurations
A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 April 2020) | Viewed by 27475
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Religious dress visibly signifies difference. This call for papers invites scholars to investigate the practical, symbolic, and gendered meanings attached to religious clothing. How are intangible values such as modesty, piety, propriety, comfort vs. confinement, purity, ostentation vs. simplicity, decorum, respectability, decency, and responsibility portrayed through religious clothing prescriptions and prohibitions? How do these reflect on gender in particular religious traditions?
Submissions may address changes in religious dress over time and place, according to political or social changes, including prevailing views of morality—the latter a measure most often applied to women’s dress. Taking dress seriously in religious studies makes visible the interplay between group norms and individuality, highlighting gender distinctions. Papers are invited which illustrate the sartorial properties associated with socially constructed categories of masculinity and femininity.
How one clothes the body may offer sartorial clues to religious devotion and one’s place in a spiritual community, and/or how the wearer balances faith, modernity vs. tradition, and “modest fashion”—a distinction used by Mormon, Mennonite, and Muslim women. Theoretical comparative models as well as individual case studies are welcome.
Religious dress may illustrate negotiated understandings between the interior and exterior. How do clothes affect the wearer, constituting particular experiences of self and gender roles? To what extent is dress used to interpret levels of spirituality by members or outsiders because they dress distinctively?
Finally, if we accept a relationship between clothing and religiosity, and if traditional gender roles are part of a group’s religious understandings, to what degree does clothing reflect such changes or to what degree does it help create changes in gender roles? To what extent can you read dress without considering the motives of the wearer, whose dress manifestations are seldom clear-cut? Is the intended message the one that is received, given that meaning-making, in regard to dress, is subject to imitation, artifice, appropriation, and performance?
Contributions addressing these questions and themes are welcome.
Dr. Beth E. Graybill
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- religiosity
- attire
- apparel
- “plain dress”
- gender roles
- sartorialism
- modest fashion
- veiling
- hijab
- anti-fashion
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