Performing the Gendered Self in Intercultural Communication

Preface

“Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness” (Bourdieu 115)

The intersectionality of culture, religion, and communication is integral to understanding the ways in which human subjects are socially constructed on the interplay of these three elements. It is through exploring the constitutive effects these three have on human subjectivities that we can more substantially comprehend how a subject is made into certain structures of being. While religious indoctrinations may have been seen as pivotal aspects of human culture, alternative approaches have emphasized on how religion suggests a culture in its own structuring. Moreover, the undeniable effect communication has on how individuals and communities conceptualize and transmit certain beliefs and practices is essential to understanding the interconnectedness of religion and culture. Thus, religious and cultural practices emerge from one another, which makes an intercultural dialogue a contested area over religious conceptualizations.

The consequential role of religious indoctrinations on gender is an incontrovertible phenomenon that is dogmatically constituting and perpetually reproducing the interactional patterns in which intercultural communication is substantiated. Similarly, the performances of social identities are not always contingent upon the relational dependency of the signifier to the signified social meaning, but there are multiplicities of interactional conflicts and symbolic interpretations that cause cross-cultural dialogues to continually merge and resolve in multiple decentered meanings. In this sense, intercultural communication in between distinct religious localities and dogmatic subjectivities is transpired within representational intricacies that arise from the dissimilar conceptualizations and marks of identity. In this regard, I seek to explore the essentialist role of the gendered hierarchies constituted through the rigorous enactment of institutionalized dogmatic power resulting in a religious scheme on gender. The gendered normativities fostered by religious indoctrinations on the feminine and masculine roles of men and women are can be explicitly seen in many aspects of intercultural ←7 | 8→communication. Thus, I am interested in the limits of religious observances in the acknowledgment and performance of restrictive, sexist, and phallocentric norms of gender. For this purpose, I invite you to an exploration of the communicational complexities that stem from the dissimilarities of cultural conceptions on gender and distinctive marks of religious gender identity. In this book, I have sought to address the interactional roadblocks in the processes of social and cultural integration as well as to lay emphasis on the limits of confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty in cross-cultural contacts.