ABSTRACT
This chapter explores relevant aspects of China's heterogeneous and multifaceted religious landscape, inscribed by competing and volatile forces of hegemonic state power and enduring religious faith and belonging. How female-centered Islamic sites of worship and learning are locally embedded in a mosaic of traditional and contemporary religious pluralism is illustrated with the case of Kaifeng. The ancient city of Kaifeng serves as a site of discussion about positionality, politics, and fieldwork ethics within a sensitive landscape of state power, political censorship, and local belief. This leads to exploring the ramifications of the absence of religious women in nationalist imaginaries across research contexts, and their implications for feminist scholarship, bringing into conversation one of China's foremost feminist philosophers and international scholars. Li Xiaojiang's reflections on the complex relationship between the Chinese state (guojia) and Chinese women (funü) as a state-steered project of liberation culminating in a paradigmatic socialist, secularized femininity raise important issues about the ideological legacy of an institutionalized standardization of gender progress for researching Chinese women's lives of faith.
