Gwendolyn Gillson

My research focuses on Buddhism, embodiment, and women, especially in contemporary Japan. Drawing on transnational feminism, affect theory, and the concept of lived religion, my research explores the effects of global economic and social change on understandings of religion, gender, and community. As the editor of the journal Body and Religion, I have a particular interest in the ways that bodies act as conduits through which religion is experienced and understood in a variety of contexts. I currently have three major ongoing projects.

My current monograph, Feeling Buddhism, uses multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork to examine the ways that Japanese women actively engage with and adapt Buddhism to meet the needs of contemporary life. My research reveals that Buddhist women in Japan actively cultivate what I call “feeling Buddhism,” which elides the mind/body dichotomy to engage the simultaneity of the affective and sensorial registers of Buddhist doctrine and practice. Grounded in my ethnography with four different Buddhist groups in Tokyo and Kyoto, the book explores multitudinous ways of understanding the body—including but not limited to otherness, aesthetics, labor, and agency—to theorize about the nature of women’s religious experiences as co-constitutive with and opposed to that of men. Through an examination of the various types of Buddhist women, from laywomen to nuns and beyond, I demonstrate how Buddhism works both within and beyond institutional walls to create both intimate and transnational networks of Buddhist women. It also explores the precarity inherent in women’s religious practices that exist outside of official institutional support, including and especially considering the fundamental transformation of women’s Buddhism during the Covid-19 pandemic.

With Paulina Kolata, I am co-editing a volume on Buddhism and labor, tentatively titled Religious Labor in the Making of Buddhist Worlds. Authors in this volume engage theoretically with the concept of “religious labor” to reveal how places, institutions, and people’s practices shape the complexities of how labor is imagined and experienced across a diverse range of Buddhist-based groups and practitioners in China, Japan, Thailand, Tibet, Myanmar, Taiwan, and the United States. We argue that religious labor is how Buddhists both challenge and negotiate contemporaneous economic frameworks, while consolidating and reifying social hierarchies. This volume originated with the workshop “Gendering Labor in Contemporary Asian Religions” that Dr. Kolata and I co-hosted at Lund University during the summer of 2022. I have a broader interest in religion and economy, including coteaching a course with the labor economist Marilyn Markel entitled Buying Gods which examines the intertwined nature of religious and economic development.

My third project involves an exploration of the affective and embodied experiences of scholars within our current academic environment. This work brings together the “affective turn” that simultaneously moves us closer to and further from the supposedly objective sciences with positionality, the feminist idea that one’s position in relation to power helps define our interests and activities, to form my central question: what would it mean to consider the position of scholars of religion with affect as the center of analysis? My work examines the scholarly affects of attraction and revulsion as key players in the decisions we make in who, what, and why we study. As a theory, affect asks us to consider the emotive dimensions of our participants; as a method, it asks us to personally engage directly with our emotional registers as foundational to our identity as scholars of religion. Rather than deny these affective responses, I argue we should turn them into objects of study and reflection in our work. Although still in its early stages, this work has appeared in Collecting Religion, alongside presentations at the American Academy of Religion and the International Association for the History of Religions.