ABSTRACT
Gender necessarily intersects with religion, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientations; this intersectionality marks each human subject socially and materially; as a result, the gender of the subject of knowledge plays a crucial role in determining epistemic norms. This chapter proposes the question of epistemic norms for gender and religion indirectly by considering the relationship between feminist identity and religious diversity debates in contemporary philosophy of religion. A strange sort of epistemic blindness allows a serious variability in the moral status of humans who differ according to faith, or lack of faith. The feminist message in western debates about religions has often been prophetic. The chapter explores the highly significant, critical and imaginative challenge of third-wave feminism in the question of epistemic locatedness, diversity and gender. A range of feminists writing on religions enables access to the myths about women and/or their sexuality, centrally, in Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu contexts.
