ABSTRACT
The starting point of Chapter 3 is a critique of epistemic violence, that is the violent determination of the possible conditions for knowledge and thought. In particular, it is produced through essentialist identitarian, exclusive ideas of gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, religion, disability and so on and can be found both in the modern hegemonic and in resistant interpretations of religious texts of antiquity. Accordingly, the chapter looks for ways to reduce epistemic violence. The intersectionality concept is analysed from a postcolonial, post-secular and queer perspective. It turns out that different approaches cannot overcome essentialisations because the paradox of law is not taken into account. The study promotes an epistemology of critical intersectionality. The method of disidentification is explained with a text excerpt from the Shepherd of Hermas. Additionally, it is criticised that in intersectional approaches, religion as a category is neglected or essentialised. It is proposed to understand religion and gender as deessentialised, denaturalised interdependent categories of knowledge. The presented approach also offers not only to analyse current discourses but also to walk historically through the a priori knowledge systems (epistemes). It could be used to show that ancient Christian texts or early Islamic texts do not (yet) reside in essentialist operating epistemes – unlike their fundamentalist interpretations of the anthropological episteme of the 19th and 20th centuries.
