292 Mary Jo Neitz
divided by nationality. Working through their differences, women – some of whom had
been marginalized in the Latino movement and in the women’s movement – mobilized
around local issues presented for women in the border context. Pena suggests that the ̃
border crisis created fields of opportunity, with a blurring of boundaries occurring on
several levels. Pena’s work is important here, in part because of her emphasis on starting ̃
with local context, but also for its contribution toward our understanding of the global
aspects of women’s oppressions. Furthermore, her discussion of boundary crossing adds
a critical dimension: We need conceptualizations that allow us to explore not just
pastors, but congregations, and not just congregations but unbounded movements
when that is where the women are.
These three authors follow a research strategy that starts with the experiences of
women in a particular location but moves through that to an emergent understanding
of institutions of oppression and movements of resistance. They do not impose abstract
theories or categories developed outside upon their subjects; the process of inquiry itself
is feminist, in part because they write as muchfortheir subjects as about them. Their
accounts are deep and rich contributions to what we know about the particularity of
women’s lives and how women’s everyday lives intersect with religion.
CONCLUSION
Some of the issues and questions raised here have also been raised by observers of con-
temporary religion. For example, there is a sense that the old theories and categories
are insufficient in the new work on “lived religion” (Hall 1997). There is a larger con-
cern for the collapse of mainline hegemony in American culture. Some who are quite
observant about what is going on in the religious scene, however, have not yet thought
through fully what the epistemological consequences of the collapse are for the kind of
work that we do: We can no longer speak with omniscient neutrality about American
religion – if “we” ever could.^17
Feminists are among those calling for research that begins but does not end in the
experiences of the people we study. Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography is a
methodology that helps researchers perform analyses that make connections from em-
bodied individuals to work/practices to texts to discourses and the relations of ruling.
Patricia Hill Collins draws our attention to the intersectionality of race, class, and gen-
der, and shows us the power of the voices of alternative traditions. Feminist theory, as
they envision it, reflects a new paradigm in sociology.
Researchers in the sociology of religion have made a substantial shift in the last
two decades: Women are no longer absent; gender is no longer ignored. Attending to
gender, however, cannot merely be a matter of “add women and stir.” Adding women
has a wonderfully disruptive potential, especially when looking at women forces us to
look in new places and at different things. Adding women raises questions about local
practices and about embodiment, emotion, and sexuality. For sociologists of religion,
(^17) As the essays in Spickard, Landres, and McGuire (2002) demonstrate, reflections on knowledge
claims among scholars of religion are not limited to feminists, although feminists are well
represented among the authors in the volume.