construal of religions as multidimensional organisms, for example, encompasses both of these possibilities, by listing the material, textual, experiential and performative dimensions that need to be considered in order to grasp a religion in its unity.[1] Smart’s model of religion has suffered extensive criticism since its inception, perhaps especially because of its phenomenological underpinnings, but it is remarkably amenable to an object-oriented approach, especially one that is prepared to view religions as a complex assemblages, comprised of countless other objects.
The question of whether one can usefully retain gender in an
object-oriented analysis is perhaps more contentious. The fact that gender
studies start with a human subject implies an already given enthrallment to
the correlationism that the speculative turn aspires to bypass. An approach
that is opposed to anthropocentrism might be expected to exhibit a
disinterest in, or else a distancing from, analyses of gender. What precisely
could an object-oriented approach to gender look like? The points that
follow indicate a way forwards, but they are proposals and hypotheses at
best. First, there is no denial within object-oriented ontology that objects
are acted upon and affect one another; objects do relate to one another,
but they are not defined by, or reducible to, their relations. Second, it
remains the case that humans as objects are differentially acted upon in
accordance with such factors as the kind of objects that they are – for
example, female, male, old, young, diseased, healthy – and also the kind of
object that they are identified as being. Third, humans are also members of
larger objects, such as organizations, religions and societies, just as they
are, in part, comprised of smaller objects, such as bacteria and microbes.
None of these points denies the existence of gender or rides rough-shod
over any specific tools of gender analysis. What an object-oriented
ontology does is multiply the number of actants and objects that
participate in the construction of gendered individuals. Social
constructivism may have accommodated such considerations as age, class,
ethnicity, race and sexuality within its analyses, object-oriented ontology
ratchets up the complexity and intensity of the constructivism by bringing
many additional objects to the table for inclusion.
The only significant object-oriented discomfort that may afflict
students of religion and gender is likely to arise from the point that causal
authority no longer rests with the human. The sovereignty of human intent
- ↑ N. Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs, Waukegan, IL: Fontana Press, 1997; N. Smart, The World’s Religions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998.
