Co-sponsored with the AAR/SBL Women’s Caucus, this panel explores the intersections of gender, freedom, and religion through the lens of feminist collaboration and mentorship. Featuring emerging scholars, the session highlights diverse global contexts—Victorian-era Korea, medieval China, contemporary South Korea, and Madagascar—to examine how women navigate, reinterpret, and resist religious and cultural constraints. Papers include analyses of Korean Protestant women’s negotiations of Victorian womanhood, African churchwomen’s movements for liberation and solidarity, strategic uses of chastity and religion in medieval China, and the paradoxes of neoliberal empowerment for evangelical businesswomen in South Korea. Together, these studies offer rich insights into how women embody, challenge, and transform religious traditions. Emphasizing intergenerational and intercultural dialogue, the panel fosters collaborative methodologies and invites participants to consider how feminist religious scholarship can be a site of both critical reflection and imaginative resistance.
This paper examines the reinterpretation of Victorian womanhood in Korean Christianity, arguing that rather than serving solely as a tool of patriarchal subjugation, the ideal of the "good wife, good mother" has been transformed into a source of spiritual authority. Using Duranno Eomeoni Hakgyo (Mother School) as a case study, this research explores how Korean Christian women navigate traditional gender norms while asserting agency through prayer, family leadership, and religious devotion. Despite lacking institutional power of the women, their numerical dominance and engagement in spiritual practices have allowed them to exert significant influence within the church. By reframing Victorian femininity as a mechanism for theological and social agency, this study contributes to a broader discourse on gender and leadership in World Christianity. Therefore, this paper highlights the complexity of non-Western feminist expressions like Gina Zurlo emphasizes in her book, demonstrating how Korean Christian women craft their own models of empowerment.
This paper explores African women's historical and contemporary challenges in navigating systemic oppression within political, religious, and cultural contexts. Despite progresses, African women continue to confront deeply entrenched barriers rooted in patriarchy, classism, and imperialism, which hinder their participation in leadership roles and decision-making processes. The study investigates the intersectionality of women's oppression, particularly within the socio-political and religious spheres, and highlights how these forces impact women's flourishing. By examining the internalized effects of this oppression, the paper offers insights to challenge these structures and foster solidarity among women. The research aims to empower women through self-determination and collective actions toward liberation and transformation, ultimately enabling them to contribute fully in the church and the public sphere.
This paper attempts to recover women’s voices about their sexuality by tracing how women in medieval China might have strategically used religion to overcome the silencing of female sexual desire. This paper first examines a medieval litigation text judging a widow’s application for official recognition as a chaste woman on the grounds that she was rewarded by Heaven for pregnancy due to her commitment to her deceased husband. By turning the Confucian ideology – good acts elicit supernatural rewards – on its head, the widow sought to have sexual activities without having her reputation compromised. Foregrounding women’s sexual agency, this paper then offers an innovative reading of a type of tales about the seduction of women by deities. I propose to treat the invocation of deities as serving an exculpatory function for “illicit” sexual conduct. Overall, this paper aims to understand women’s sexual agency within the given oppressive cultural and historical contexts.
This paper explores the case of a Korean evangelical businesswoman who operates a global franchise, investigating the complexities of economic class and the shifting freedoms of evangelical women in the historical context following the 2008 Global Recession. In contemporary society, evangelical womanhood is no longer confined to domestic spheres. The expansion of women’s education and the economic downturn have increased female workforce participation, resulting in women shouldering dual responsibilities at home and in the workplace — a reality that extends to evangelical women as well. By analyzing this case study, this paper aims to contribute to the discussion on the interconnectedness of class, gender, and liberation.