This ethnographic study shows that women’s knowledge and practices involving food in Japanese Buddhist contexts circulate as gendered currency. It emphasizes how what we term “food literacy” cultivates aesthetic and affective senses of belonging among Buddhist practitioners. We argue that this embodied knowledge helps women negotiate their experiences of Buddhism and show how these experiences articulate the complexities of their bounded and self-disciplining Buddhist selves. Women use food literacy to teach, learn, and practice the way Buddhism feels and etch it into their own and others’ emotional, social, and material bodies. By recognizing women as stewards of religion, particularly through food literacy, we also elucidate how women’s uses of mundane practices illuminate food literacy as a value carrier that generates belonging through food. Such practices can equally become sites of failure to connect if the intended recipients do not share understandings or appreciations of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of it.

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What does it mean to be a feminist ethnographer of religion? As a methodological, epistemological, and theoretical framework, feminist ethnography prioritizes participant observation that recognizes copresence, power, and reciprocity between the researcher and her interlocutors and is essential to the study of religion. However, the nature of religious studies as a discipline contributes to a fundamental misunderstanding about the place and importance of feminist ethnography. The normative white, patriarchal, Protestant narratives that form the basis of the field work against its widespread acceptance within the academy. This article brings together scholarship in religious studies with that of anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines to illustrate the significance of feminist ethnography in the study of religion in order to challenge these unspoken and problematic assumptions. By appreciating the outlined "building blocks, " scholars of religion can come to value and potentially employ feminist ethnography in their own work.