A Garland of Feminist Reflections

A GARLAND OF FEMINIST REFLECTIONS: FORTY YEARS OF RELIGIOUS EXPLORATION . By Rita M. Gross . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2009 . Pp. 340 . Cloth, $60.00; paper, $24.95 . Gross's new book contains already published and newly penned essays selected by the author to highlight important moments in her forty-year career as a prominent Buddhist theologian and feminist thinker. Major themes include the methodological contribution of the “feminist paradigm shift” to the study of religion, religion as a resource for feminists, and the fruitful but fraught marriage of feminism and Buddhism in Gross's own intellectual journey. This bold and unapologetically opinionated work mixes autobiography, political reflection, and academic theory, making it of interest to Buddhist constructive thinkers and potentially useful (if properly contextualized) in undergraduate classes on gender and religion. Gross's constricted conceptualization of gender, which she describes repeatedly as a prison-like set of norms (rather than a complex and potentially creative category), will quell any interest this book might have held for feminist scholars in other humanistic fields and will represent a source of frustration for younger feminist scholars of religion. Her historically ungrounded and monolithic references to “Buddhism,”“Hinduism,” and “Vajrayana,” and her excessive reliance on secondary literature mean that this book will hold little interest for serious historians of Buddhism or South Asian religion

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