Item Detail
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21917
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3
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0
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English
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Agency, Subjectivity and Essentialism Within Traditional Religious Cultures : An Ethnographic Study of an American Latter-day Saint Community
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Claremont, California
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Claremont Graduate University
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239
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Ph.D. diss.
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"Feminist theory, which is both an analytical endeavor and a political project, is one of the most important academic trends in recent history. Within religious studies, it is virtually impossible to engage in an analysis of women without employing feminist theory. This dissertation argues that feminist theory, in its various forms, inadvertently masks the primary commitments and knowledges of traditional religious women because it is culturally bound to American and European political notions. This is manifest through a tendency to over politicize traditional religious women's motives, by characterizing religions in political terms, and by discounting how cosmology shapes gendered religious practices. Furthermore, due to the politics inherent in feminist theory, the feminist analytical categories of agency and subjectivity have been narrowly defined. As a result, behaviors that resist religious norms have been used exclusively as evidence of women's agency. Conversely, behaviors that sustain tradition, which are arguably important aspects of subjectivity, have been discounted and understudied. Overall, this dissertation advocates for cultural specific renderings of gender analysis that are detached from politics, but that take the category of gender as a serious site of study in order to gain a fuller picture of the lives and practices of traditional religious women. In order to work through these challenges, I utilize an ethnographic study of a community of American women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Latter-day Saint women offer an interesting framework because they adhere to an unapologetic ally patriarchal religion, they use the category of agency as an indigenous concept, they believe that maternity is an essential component of religious subjectivity, and they resemble a traditional religious culture in their belief in a highly differentiated gendered cosmology. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, considered in some ways a quintessential American religion, offers an instructive example of the limits of liberal feminist theory to adequately explain American religious women." [Author's abstract]