This issue of Feminist Review, edited by Lyn Thomas and Avtar Brah, will explore a range of religious and spiritual practices through the lens of gender, and will encompass both theoretical and empirical approaches. We hope to engage with feminism’s long history of critique of the patriarchal nature of world religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and more recent problematisations of these approaches in light of feminism’s relationship to the Enlightenment and to colonialism.
Recent work on the gendering of secularisation theories and on women’s practice of faith and spirituality has complicated and nuanced feminist approaches to religion; this issue will address these questions, while attempting to broaden the debate beyond the binary oppositions and alignments of religion (and most notably Islam) with tradition and ‘backwardness’, and of feminisms with modernity and secularism. The issue will also probe the possibilities of secular spiritualities for women, and the diversity and evolution of religious beliefs and practices in the context of global cultural exchanges through migration, media and travel.
Some of the areas we hope to address are:

• women’s practice of spirituality within and outside faith traditions
• women’s relationships with, and role in organised religion and religious institutions
• Contemporary and historical feminist critiques of, and participations in, established religions
• Religious identities, gender, class, ‘race’ and ethnicity
• Religion, gender, diaspora
• LGBTQI spiritualities and relationships to religion
• ‘new age’ spiritualities and gender
• sexuality and spirituality
• Feminist readings of sacred texts
• Women’s writing of spirituality and religious experience
• -Gendering representations of religion

Submissions for the issue are welcomed from now until FEBRUARY 28th 2010. Articles should be between 6,000-7,000 words in length. An abstract of 200-300 words should accompany the article, plus a list of up to six keywords suitable for indexing and abstracting services. Detailed instructions on how to submit (electronic submission only) can be found at http://www.palgrave-journals.com/fr/index.html
We also welcome shorter pieces of creative or analytical writing (up to 1000 words, or 4000 words for interviews) or visual material on the theme for our ‘Open Space’ section. These pieces may be topical and/or polemical. They are not sent out to be peer-reviewed, but are selected by the editors of the issue. Enquiries about the issue should be sent to Dr Lyn Thomas (l.thomas@londonmet.ac.uk ).