TY - CHAP

T1 - Working through Gender in Buddhist Spaces

AU - Kolata, Paulina

AU - Starling, Jessica

PY - 2025

Y1 - 2025

N2 - In this chapter we investigate the entanglement of Buddhism, gender, and space to argue that women and their labor create Buddhist institutions and communities in contemporary Japan. Buddhism has always been deeply embedded in gendered and gendering social contexts with women's work as an intrinsic element of Buddhist practice that inherently involves circulation of material and spiritual values. Women practitioners are active agents in navigating Buddhist spaces and structures to create such values and develop spaces for gendered inclusion and exclusion on institutional, communal, and domestic levels. In this chapter, we focus on lay and non-elite Buddhist women such as Buddhist temple wives and members of Buddhist women associations to develop an understanding of complex and often gendered dimensions of Buddhist spaces by considering women’s ritual and voluntary labor. We draw on ethnographic data, contextualized through existing scholarship in English and Japanese languages, to articulate the tensions that emerge when we start paying attention to the importance of gendered and gendering religious spaces that are routinely dismissed as being marginal to the Buddhist institution.

AB - In this chapter we investigate the entanglement of Buddhism, gender, and space to argue that women and their labor create Buddhist institutions and communities in contemporary Japan. Buddhism has always been deeply embedded in gendered and gendering social contexts with women's work as an intrinsic element of Buddhist practice that inherently involves circulation of material and spiritual values. Women practitioners are active agents in navigating Buddhist spaces and structures to create such values and develop spaces for gendered inclusion and exclusion on institutional, communal, and domestic levels. In this chapter, we focus on lay and non-elite Buddhist women such as Buddhist temple wives and members of Buddhist women associations to develop an understanding of complex and often gendered dimensions of Buddhist spaces by considering women’s ritual and voluntary labor. We draw on ethnographic data, contextualized through existing scholarship in English and Japanese languages, to articulate the tensions that emerge when we start paying attention to the importance of gendered and gendering religious spaces that are routinely dismissed as being marginal to the Buddhist institution.

M3 - Book chapter

BT - Handbook of Women in Japanese Buddhism

A2 - Simpson, Emily

A2 - Schrimpf, Monika

PB - MHM Limited

ER -