Gender and the (In)divisibility of Contested Sacred Places: The Case of Women for the Temple

Abstract

Contested sacred sites, over which different religious groups assert claims to exclusivity, have drawn scholarly attention to the spatial interaction between religion and politics. However, the gendered dimensions of inter-communal religious-political disputes over sacred space, and women's roles in these site-specific conflicts, have been largely neglected. Using a case study of Orthodox Jewish women's activism for access to Temple Mount al-Haram al-Sharif, this article demonstrates how attention to gender and to women's engagement in inter-communal conflict over sacred places can illuminate unique intra-communal processes that aim to make a contested sacred site increasingly indivisible for parties to the conflict.

Negotiating the Pulpit: African-American Clergywomen’s Acceptance of Guest Speaking Invitations

“…Prickett (2015) applied this approach to women in an African American mosque, where she found women resisted gender, economic and racial oppression through their negotiating of gendered places within the mosque. Similarly, Ben Shitrit (2017) demonstrates the value of examining women's activism in contested sacred spaces, by exploring intercommunal conflict over sacred places in Israel.…”