Dr. Andrea Jain
Andrea R. Jain (R&SAP Leadership Team member) is professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and author of Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford, 2014) and Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality (Oxford, 2020). She received her doctorate degree in Religious Studies from Rice University in 2010. Her areas of research include religion and capital; global spirituality and modern yoga; the intersections of gender, sexuality, and religion; and theories of religion. https://www.andreajain.com
Supported Project:
Dr. Andrea Jain, “Excess and Restraint: Sexual Politics in the Study of Religion”
Andrea Jain’s work is an attempt at disciplinary reflexivity. She reflects on religious studies scholarship on sexual abuse, especially building on her previous work on yoga and sexual violence. She is particularly interested in analyzing an approach that focuses on individual cases and institutions, and the problem that this approach sometimes generates. That is, how it can be inattentive to broader analyses of the social and political systems in which individuals and institutions are responsive to, embedded in, and shaped by, while overemphasizing the individual and institutional autonomy to choose. In other words, her work addresses how a focus on individuals and institutions may obscure larger social and political questions, such as how contemporary religious institutions internalize the norms of capitalist corporate cultures, that should also be the concern of inquiry into religion and sexual abuse. Furthermore, her work reflects on how scholarly analyses of religion and sexual abuse depend in part on the social and political structures in which the scholars themselves operate, in other words, how our disciplinary practices internalize the very gender and sexual norms we seek to critique.
