Dorrough Smith/Hijacked, 6. Privatized Publics and Scholarly Silos

This essay takes up Naomi Goldenberg’s interest in the construction of the private realm as a place where violence in the name of religion is often permitted. It discusses how scholars of religion are often ready and willing to politically deconstruct the category of religion even as they fail to see the politics that underlie other categories, and considers how this plays out in the case of gender.