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Gender and Sacred Textures

By Marianne Schleicher

Gender and Sacred Textures

By Marianne Schleicher

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Description
This anthology asks how the handling, use, and embodied enactments of sacred texts regulate, entangle, occlude, tolerate, or even subvert religious and gendered identities. While many studies have looked at the semantic content of sacred texts to answer this question, this volume looks at the effects on gender that follow from uses of sacred texts as directly accessible, material objects, and from embodied enactments of sacred texts in indirect ways. To signify the embodied enactment of sacred texts not directly at hand, Marianne Schleicher coins the term "sacred texture" to extend sacred text studies to capture the textuality of poetic and narrative expressions in oral cultures and how most lay people, often women, have expressed their religiosity through indirect uses of sacred texts through bodily enactments.
Among the insights this volume offers are:
¿how Old Norse women's composition of oral sacred textures renders their gender fluid; ¿how a sacred text in Numbers 5 is used to handle a woman and simultaneously bolsters the masculinities of the involved men;¿how Jewish women through centuries have been intelligible by enabling men's direct access to sacred texts or by bodily enacting sacred textures themselves;¿how both Christian women and sacred texts should leave adornments behind to embody Jerome's ascetic ideals;¿how four women in contemporary American Judaism write Esther scrolls according to halakhic rules to become intelligible as scribes despite their female gender;¿how American Evangelical women have compensated for the absence of a directly accessible Bible at work by bodily enacting fragments of the Bible; ¿how Muslim family members in Denmark bodily enact and navigate Qur'anic prescriptions on filial piety up against its prescriptions concerning the naked body.
Product details
Binding:
Paperback
Number of Pages:
208
Release Date:
2025-03-01
Publication Date:
2025-09-15
Publisher:
Equinox Publishing Ltd
Languages:
Original: English
ISBN10:
1800505523
ISBN13:
9781800505520
Weight:
324 g
Height:
156 cm
Width:
234 cm
Thickness:
11 cm
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