Abstract
People’s consciousness toward gender issues has undergone considerable change in Japanese society during the past two decades, and this has naturally influenced scholarship as well. Where feminist and gender studies in Japan have advanced, religion has been a less than frequent topic for Japanese scholars of feminist and gender studies. For many feminists, religion is a tool of patriarchy that is still used to oppress and exclude women and to deny them the opportunity to make their own decisions.
This chapter constitutes an endeavor by three Japanese women who are feminist scholars of religion (all of whom have had scholarly training in the West) to analyze the male dominance structure, gender blindness, and institutional androcentrism that are built-in to the religious studies community in Japan, together with an attempt at redressing this. Speaking from our own individual experiences, we lay bare the present reality of these issues (especially the particular instances found in Japan) and relate the strategies we have developed for dealing with them.
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Kawahashi, N., Komatsu, K., Kuroki, M. (2013). Gendering Religious Studies: Reconstructing Religion and Gender Studies in Japan. In: Gross, Z., Davies, L., Diab, AK. (eds) Gender, Religion and Education in a Chaotic Postmodern World. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5270-2_8
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