30/06/2026 14:30 - 16:30

HALL: Pola - A206a

Contact: Angileri I.

Chair: Rotondo A.

The historiography on Christianity has developed a solid tradition of studies on women. This approach has addressed issues such as women's roles in leadership, teaching, prophecy, and ritual, the formation of gender through theological and scriptural exegesis, and the ways female figures have been remembered, reinterpreted, or erased. Yet, as Joan W. Scott observed in 2010, many historians remain hesitant to engage fully with critical approaches to gender and sexuality, often treating "women" as a self-evident and homogeneous category rather than as a historically constructed one.
Moving beyond sexual and gender binarism as the dominant interpretative framework in historical studies, this panel approaches the "feminine" as a socio-cultural construct open to critical historical inquiry. It problematizes the category, examining its origins and strategic functions in religious knowledge production, ecclesiastical authority, and communal identities. Being defined as "women" is not a neutral act. It presupposes the elaboration of attributional and citational criteria concerning what constitutes a woman and what does "female" mean; criteria that are historically situated and subject to variation.
The panel asks how Christian traditions reshaped and resemanticized notions of femaleness and how these concepts were negotiated within broader cultural frameworks. Its aim is to foster an interdisciplinary, and critical discussion on what has been the role of Christianity in shaping a female gender/sex paradigm that in some ways is still ours. In doing so, it seeks to bridge women's studies, reconstructing women's roles in Christian contexts, and gender/sex studies. The feminine is thus understood not as a fixed or pre-discursive essence, but rather as a connotative, dialogically constructed one that interacts with other categories such as sanctity, martyrdom, and divinity as articulated by diverse Christian traditions across different temporal and spatial contexts.