Heiko Kiser, Felix Krämer, Antje Schnoor / Cluster of Excellence „Religion and Politics“, University of Muenster; Olaf Stieglitz / Erfurt University

Time: 29.-30.09.2011
Venue: Münster, Torhaus der Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Raum S01, Krummer Timpen 3-5
Deadline for registration: 25.09.2011
Questions concerning gender relations in religious practices and discourses have been debated for quite some time. Cultural historians have looked into the impact of religion on the development of the Western bourgeois gender order and focused on power relations in colonial as well as in postcolonial contexts. This conference addresses masculinities and religions in the course of the 20th century. Bringing
different intersections of masculinity and religion into the focus expands a perspective wherein the impact of women and femininity on socio-religious orders has hitherto been addressed by gender historiography. „The Americas“ are framing our discussions geographically, whereas this area is not homogeneous – in fact it
consists of many differing and conflicting regions, varying cultures and histories. On the basis of case studies which need to be understood rather as snapshots in motion than as facets of a coherent big picture, we would like to locate different theoretical perspectives.
To focus on masculinities inevitably requires taking the relationality of the category gender seriously and conducting an intersectional power analysis wherein religion again is conceptualized as a tremendously important socio-political factor among others. We would like to explore on the one hand the meaning of religion in the construction of masculinities and the impact of masculinity concepts on religion and religious institutions on the other. Considering migration, exchange, and transfer among cultures, ideas, and institutions in twentieth-century Americas – a geographical space, which is both marked by violent imbalances of power as by subtle forms of hegemony – will achieve analytical acuity, if it is guided by questions on the nexus of gender and religion. At the conference, we would like to discuss different approaches, hoping to develop further conceptual ideas.   
PROGRAM
Thursday, September 29, 2011
1.00-2.00 pm: Welcome
2.00-4.00 pm: Introduction / Keynote
Chair: Antje Schnoor
Olaf Stieglitz (Erfurt): Add Religion and Stir!? Gender History and the Question of (Male) Religiosity
Erhard Gerstenberger (Marburg): Maleness between Deification and Condemnation. Musings over Gender Relations in the Americas
 
4.15-6.15 pm: Normative Order
Chair: Barbara Rupflin
Amy Koehlinger (Tallahassee): ‚Up, Catholic Men!‘: Pugilism, Militarism
and American Catholic Manhood, 1900-1950
Antje Schnoor (Münster): Religious Obedience Since the 1960s; or, What
Kind of Man is a Chilean Jesuit?
 
Comment: Silke Hensel (Münster)
 
6.45-8.15 pm: Keynote
Chair: Heiko Kiser
Dagmar Herzog (New York): The Therapeutization of Heterosexual Masculinity: Evangelical Sexual Politics at the Turn of the Millennium
Friday, September 30, 2011
10.00 am-12.00 pm: Media
Chair: Ulrike Bock
Felix Krämer (Münster): ‚God’s Man for The Hour‘: Reincarnating Moral Masculinity on TV in the US around 1980
Uta Balbier (London): Men Being Saved. Masculinity and  Conversion at Billy Graham’s 1950s Crusades
   
Comment: Maria Fritsche (Trondheim)
2.30-4.30 pm: Reform Movements
Chair: Debora Gerstenberger
Anja-Maria Bassimir (Münster): Conservative Counterrevolution: US-American Evangelicals and Family Values
Heiko Kiser (Münster): Did Liberation Theology Subvert Gendered Rule? Masculinities, Race and Class as Performed in Public Church Celebrations in Oaxaca, Mexico
 
Comment: Marie-Theres Wacker (Münster)
5.00-6.30 pm: Panel Discussion