Gender Strategies and Disciplinary Practices in Religious Communities

Gender Order and Romanian Orthodox Women in Italy: A Socio-Religious Perspective

This article offers a brief overview of recent theoretical socioreligious approaches to the study of gender order and religion. The authors elaborate them by linking to the reflections on religion’s encounter with (Western) modernity as applied to the case of Eastern Orthodoxy. The article then briefly reviews the official position of the Romanian Orthodox Church on the issues of gender order in the family.

Peter and Fevronia and the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity: Pronatalism and Unstable Gender Order in Contemporary Russia

This paper investigates the role of the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity in the deployment of Russian state family policy since 2006. It argues that the holiday is emblematic of a cooperative, rather than synchronous, relationship between Church and state in the promotion of pronatalism and so-called “traditional family values”, and highlights the ways in which public discourse around the holiday intentionally obscures internal contradictions within the dominant family ideologies of both institutions.

Theology of Decorum: Perspectives on Women’s External Appearance among Evangelical Christians-Baptists in the Late- and Post-Soviet Periods

This article uses oral history interviews to examine the memory of believers from Evangelical Christian-Baptist (ECB) churches regarding the requirements for women’s external appearance as a reflection of their personal piety. While discussing believers’ memory of the late Soviet period, the article demonstrates that these congregations focused almost exclusively on women.

Marriage Ideas and Practices among Evangelical Believers in the Soviet Union in 1940–1980s: The Case of Central Black Earth Region

The scope of the present research is the evolution of marriage and family ideas in the Evangelical Christian Baptist movement after World War II in the Soviet Union. The author analyzed the special views on marriage among the Russian Baptists, found in the Baptist bulletin “Bratsky Vestnik” (Fraternal Bulletin), as well as in the archival documents from the Evangelical Christian Baptist churches of Tambov, Voronezh and Lipetsk regions. The author reconstructs the model of marriage relationships and family practices among the Evangelicals.

“Vocation in the Flesh”: Gender and Embodiment in Religious Anthropology of Contemporary Catholicism

In the early and medieval Christian tradition, the gendered body was understood as both an obstacle to the cultivation of virtues and a potential medium of transgression. The contemporary Catholic anthropology has another view of the subject’s body and its senses and desires. This article is concerned with the pastoral project of encouraging priestly and monastic callings in the Russian Catholic parishes. It also specifically looks at its rhetoric, placing significant emphasis on gendered embodiment.

Gender Discourse Transformation within Contemporary Catholicism

This article analyzes the transformation of gender discourse within contemporary Catholicism after Vatican II Council. The author shows how numerous discussions among Catholic intellectuals and ordinary Catholics on gender equality, women’s role in the church tradition, respect to sexual minorities and other out-groups historically discriminated within the traditionalist conservative approach are being actualized at the current stage of development of Catholic thought.

“Blessed Are You, Who Has (Not) Made Me a Woman”? Feminist Turn in Judaism and Jewish Studies

The article presents a review of the scholarship published in the last half-century that constitutes the feminist turn in Judaism and Jewish studies and analyzes the causes and the main trends of this phenomenon, in particular, the practice of combining academic research and public activism. The first part of this review examines feminist criticism of Judaism and feminist theorizing aimed at gender reform of contemporary Judaism. The second part analyzes research that recovers women’s presence in Biblical, Talmudic, and medieval Judaism.

Women Talking About Women: A Muslim Woman in the Tatar Periodical Press of the Early 20th Century

This article deals with the study of the formation of two gender discourses, male and female, in Muslim Tatar periodicals of the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. The study is based on an analysis of such journals as “Syuyumbike”, “Azat Khanym” (“Liberated Woman”), the most authoritative journal of the Russian Muslims “Shura” (“The Council”), and other periodicals that dealt with the “women’s issue.” In this discourse, women took as active part as men, with respective differences.