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Voicing Women's Resistance Within Religious Studies: An Interrogation Of Rational Choice Theory, Anne E. Tedore

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

While women are generally oppressed within hierarchical and patriarchal religious traditions, researchers continue to detail the ways women negotiate power and construct meaning in religion. Within this thesis I interrogate the use of rational choice theory, a prominent theory utilized to describe religious behavior, as a framework for the analysis of women's religious experience and agency. I compare two texts, Brenda Brasher's Godly Women: Fundamentalism and Female Power and Jeanette Rodriguez's Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment Among Mexican-American Women, in order to illustrate the inadequacies of rational choice theory in describing the religious experiences of marginalized women. I …