Gender, Dress and Religion: Contexts and Configurations

Dear Colleagues,

Religious dress visibly signifies difference. This call for papers invites scholars to investigate the practical, symbolic, and gendered meanings attached to religious clothing. How are intangible values such as modesty, piety, propriety, comfort vs. confinement, purity, ostentation vs. simplicity, decorum, respectability, decency, and responsibility portrayed through religious clothing prescriptions and prohibitions? How do these reflect on gender in particular religious traditions?

Submissions may address changes in religious dress over time and place, according to political or social changes, including prevailing views of morality—the latter a measure most often applied to women’s dress. Taking dress seriously in religious studies makes visible the interplay between group norms and individuality, highlighting gender distinctions. Papers are invited which illustrate the sartorial properties associated with socially constructed categories of masculinity and femininity.

How one clothes the body may offer sartorial clues to religious devotion and one’s place in a spiritual community, and/or how the wearer balances faith, modernity vs. tradition, and “modest fashion”—a distinction used by Mormon, Mennonite, and Muslim women. Theoretical comparative models as well as individual case studies are welcome.

Religious dress may illustrate negotiated understandings between the interior and exterior. How do clothes affect the wearer, constituting particular experiences of self and gender roles? To what extent is dress used to interpret levels of spirituality by members or outsiders because they dress distinctively?

Finally, if we accept a relationship between clothing and religiosity, and if traditional gender roles are part of a group’s religious understandings, to what degree does clothing reflect such changes or to what degree does it help create changes in gender roles? To what extent can you read dress without considering the motives of the wearer, whose dress manifestations are seldom clear-cut? Is the intended message the one that is received, given that meaning-making, in regard to dress, is subject to imitation, artifice, appropriation, and performance?

Contributions addressing these questions and themes are welcome.

Dr. Beth E. Graybill
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• religiosity
• attire
• apparel
• “plain dress”
• gender roles
• sartorialism
• modest fashion
• veiling
• hijab
• anti-fashion