Gender and the Language of Religion
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Gender and the Language of Religion Edited by Allyson Jule Gender and the Language of Religion Also by Allyson Jule GENDER, PARTICIPATION AND SILENCE IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: Sh-Shushing the Girls Gender and the Language of Religion Edited by Allyson Jule University of Glamorgan, UK Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Allyson Jule 2005 Preface and individual chapters © the authors 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–4862–5 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–4862–3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gender and the language of religion / Allyson Jule, [editor]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4862–3 1. Sex – Religious aspects. 2. Sex role – Religious aspects. I. Jule, Allyson, 1965– BL65.S4G47 2005 200Ј.82—dc22 2005041532 10987654321 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne Contents Notes on Contributors vii Acknowledgements ix Foreword x Miriam Meyerhoff Introduction: The Meeting of Gender, Language and Religion 1 Allyson Jule Part I Gender, Language Patterns and Religious Thought 7 1 An Overview of God and Gender in Religion 9 Münevver Tekcan 2 The Gender of God: Judeo-Christian Feminist Debates 25 Francis Britto 3 Asymmetries of Male/Female Representation in Arabic 41 Samira Farwaneh 4 American Women: Their Cursing Habits and Religiosity 63 Timothy Jay Part II Gender and Language Use in Religious Communities 85 5 Women and Men: Languages and Religion in Taiwan 87 Chao-Chih Liao 6 Women’s Letters to the Editor: Talking Religion in a Saudi Arabian English Newspaper 101 Hannes Kniffka 7 A Cyber-Parish: Gendered Identity Construction in an On-Line Episcopal Community 133 Sage Graham v vi Contents 8 Language Use and Silence as Morality: Teaching and Lecturing at an Evangelical Theology College 151 Allyson Jule 9 The Children of God Who Wouldn’t, but Had To 168 Annabelle Mooney Part III Gender and Language Use in Religious Identity 185 10 ‘Restoring the Broken Image’: The Language of Gender and Sexuality in an Ex-Gay Ministry 187 Amy Peebles 11 ‘Assalam u Alaikum. Brother I have a Right to My Opinion on This’: British Islamic Women Assert Their Positions in Virtual Space 203 Fazila Bhimji 12 ‘Inshallah, today there will be work’: Senegalese Women Entrepreneurs Constructing Identities through Language Use and Islamic Practice 221 Shartriya Collier 13 Gender, Hebrew Language Acquisition and Religious Values in Jewish High Schools in North America 240 Debra Cohen and Nancy Berkowitz 14 Speaking Our Gendered Selves: Hinduism and the Indian Woman 257 Kalyani Shabadi Index 270 Notes on Contributors NANCY BERKOWITZ, PhD, is an independent consultant in research, measurement and evaluation in Massachusetts, USA. She assists individ- uals, corporations and non-profit organizations with research design and data analysis, test development and programme evaluation. FAZILA BHIMJI, PhD, is Lecturer in Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. Her research interests are multifold. She is currently working on gender, language, power and spiritual identities among Muslim women in Britain today. FRANCIS BRITTO, PhD, is Professor of Linguistics at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. His work is related to computer literacy, feminism, India, sociolinguistics, the Internet and religions. He has most recently served as Programme Chair for the JALT International Conferences. DEBRA COHEN is a doctoral candidate at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, examining the role of attitude and motivation among teenagers learning Hebrew. She has worked as a child therapist and edu- cational psychologist in the United States and currently in Israel. SHARTRIYA COLLIER is a doctoral candidate in Language Education at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA, where she also lectures in bilin- gual and multicultural education. Her research interests include immi- grant women entrepreneurs and language acquisition. SAMIRA FARWANEH, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Linguistics in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA. Her research interests include Arabic phonol- ogy, morphology and sociolinguistics, particularly language and gender issues. SAGE GRAHAM, PhD, is Assistant Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Memphis in Tennessee, USA. Her current research addresses identity formation and conflict in computer-mediated com- munication, the impact of technology on teaching effectiveness and medical discourse. TIMOTHY JAY, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. He has written several books and articles on cursing and vii viii Notes on Contributors psycholinguistics. His research deals with verbal aggression and the use of taboo language. ALLYSON JULE, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Glamorgan, Wales, UK. She has published several articles and a book on ethnic-minority girls in classrooms and is particularly focused on the use of gendered linguistic space among classroom participants. HANNES KNIFFKA, DPhil, is Professor of General and Applied Linguistics at Bonn University, Germany. He has published several books and articles on sociolinguistics, ‘culture-contrastive’ and anthropological linguistics, textlinguistics and forensic linguistics. CHOA-CHIH LIAO, PhD, is Associate Professor of English and Linguistics at National Chiayi University, Taiwan. Her research interests include cross- cultural communication, humorology, onomastics, as well as language and religion related to Chinese or Taiwanese societies. MIRIAM MEYERHOFF, PhD, is Reader in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of several books and articles on language use and is an active scholar in the field of feminist linguistics. ANNABELLE MOONEY, PhD, is a Research Associate at Cardiff University in the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Wales, UK. Her research interests include the rhetoric of marginal religious movements. AMY PEEBLES, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, USA. Her research interests include language and identity, language ideology, gender, sexuality, religion and life history narratives. KALYANI SHABADI, PhD, is a Researcher at the Resource Centre for Indian Language Technology Solutions, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Her main areas of research are formal syntax, semantics, compu- tational morphology and sociolinguistics. MÜNEVVER TEKCAN, PhD, is Assistant Professor in Turkology at Kocaeli University in Turkey. Her current research activities include linguistic analyses of Middle Turkish and Chagatay manuscripts. She has a special interest in Central Asian Sufi texts. Acknowledgements The contributors in this collection are to be recognized for their massive efforts, particularly under tight summer deadlines, as well as for their exceptional and innovative research connecting gender, religion and language. It has been a great joy to work with each of them and to have such an impressive and varied collection of research projects all in one place. I particularly wish to thank Miriam Meyerhoff at the University of Edinburgh for her generous support and for her insightful and impor- tant comments in the book’s foreword. I would also like to thank the many people who helped in developing the concept for this book. The encouragement received by scholars at IGALA3 (International Gender and Language Association at Cornell University, June 2004) greatly helped to strengthen my reserves to bring this collection together. I am especially grateful to Jill Lake at Palgrave who encouraged the book, recognizing a vacuum in linguistic study connecting religion and discourse. Thank you too to Nikki Niles for her thoughtful cover photograph, and to Cheryl Wall and Penny Simmons for their help in the editing process. And finally, all of the contributors in this collection wish to extend their personal acknowledgements to the family and friends who continually support their work. ix Foreword Most people in the