Life in Language
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The picture to the right shows Henny Dons. She was one of several women who advocated for greater status for women in Christian organizations in Norway, especially in Christian mission organizations, in the early twentieth century. This was the time of the first-wave women's movement in Scandinavia, and Henny Dons and others have later been thought of as the "mission feminists." I am particularly interested in the fact that in this picture, she is casually holding a notebook.
In my research on the "mission feminists" I have been struck by how tightly intertwined their new thinking about women was with new language practices. The women seem to me to have carried out experiments with new ways of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. However, the connection between women and words has often been problematic in the history of Christianity. What happened when these women tried to forge new connections between themselves and words, between bodies and language, in multiple material-discursive configurations? Life in Language: Mission Feminists and the Emergence of a New Protestant Subject is forthcoming from the Class 200 series at the University of Chicago Press in March 2025. Some further articles and chapters have also come out of this project, and I've posted links to them below. |
Photograph of Henrikke Margrethe "Henny" Dons, date unknown, shared on the genealogical research website MyHeritage.
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The 1930 edition of the Bible published by the Norwegian Bible Society (Det Norske Bibelselskap).
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Reading"The Religious Feminist Subject as Material-Discursive Circuit:
A Christian Woman Reads and Re-reads Eve," Religion & Gender, 2024. Download PDF |
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Reading"A Language-and-Materiality Approach to Reading:
Reinvigorating Thirty-Year-Old Questions," co-authored with Britt Halvorson, in Matthew Rosen, ed., The Ethnography of Reading at Thirty, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Download PDF |
Bolette Gjør, first editor of the women's magazine Missionslæsning for Kvindeforeninger (Mission Reading for Women's Groups), started in 1884.
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Writing"Value Moves in Multiple Ways:
Ethical Values, the Anthropology of Christianity, and an Example of Women and Movement," Anthropological Theory, 2022. Download PDF |
The biblical account of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42) in the 1904 translation by the Norwegian Bible Society.
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Reading"Reconnecting Language and Materiality in Christian Reading:
A Comparative Analysis of Two Groups of Protestant Women," co-authored with Britt Halvorson, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2021. Download PDF |
Front page of the mission periodical Norsk Missionstidende (Norwegian Mission Tidings), 1910, showing "the call."
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Listening"An Ethics of Response:
Protestant Christians' Relation with God and Elsewheres," Religion and Society, 2020. Download PDF |