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USA - RELIGION, POLITICS &
GENDER EQUALITY (Draft)
Authors:
Janet R. Jakobsen, Elizabeth Bernstein
Programme Area: Gender
and Development
Project Title: Religion,
Politics and Gender Equality
No. of Pages: 59
This
is the Final Research Report on the US in the Religion, Politics and Gender
Equality Project.
Abstract:
Despite
the official separation of church and state in the United States, religion and
politics are closely intertwined. This intertwining can be attributed both to
the profound influence of religious organizations on the political process and
to the secular institutions of public life which operate by presuming
Protestant norms and values. The authors of this paper argue that the problem
for gender equality in the United States is not the influence of religion alone,
but Protestant hegemony in terms of both religious influence and secular
presumption. They demonstrate this through two contrasting cases studies:
policies around human trafficking during the Bush and Obama Administrations and
“welfare reform” during the Clinton years. In the case of trafficking, they
show how the Bush Administration’s coalition of secular feminist and
conservative religious groups has given way under President Obama to a
different coalition of faith-based and secular actors characterized by certain
continuities of policy aims and method. The most important continuities are the
persistence of carceral feminism and militarized humanitarianism. In the case
of “welfare reform,” which was supported by a bipartisan coalition of
conservative evangelicals and secular advocates, all of the parties used a
conservative rhetoric of gender, race, and sexuality to support the policy.
This coalition of conservative evangelicals and secular neoliberals easily
overwhelmed the direct religious influence of both Catholic and mainline
Protestant groups who stood in opposition to “welfare reform.” In both of these
cases, it is argued that the major policy alternatives are those that raise not
just the issue of religious influence on policies affecting gender equality,
but also question neoliberalism and its impact on gender relations and women’s
lives. In forming political alliances, the authors emphasize, feminists should
situate gender within a broad array of political and economic concerns while
challenging Protestant dominance in both its religious and secular guises.
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