Working against many grains : rethinking difference, emancipation and agency in the counter-discourse of an ethnic minority women’s organisation in Belgium

In this article, we aim to contribute to feminist academic debates about multiculturalism and secularism/religion by drawing upon an analysis of an ethnic minority women’s organisation in Belgium that has been active since 1999: ella. The analysis focuses upon the way in which ella constructs notions of empowerment and emancipation by discussing structural inequalities, cultural-ethnic values and religious authority and identity. First, we look at how ella formulates its ideas about the emancipation trajectories of minoritised women and the potential role of religious belonging. Second, we look at ella’s discussion of religious interpretation and gender/sexual diversity. Here, we explore assumptions about the relationship between religious authority and minoritised women’s and LGBTQs’ desires and pursuit for knowledge. We conclude by considering ella as an affirmative-critical actor of multiculturalism, and an implicit agent of religious reform

Gendered and Embodied Un/learning among Women Disengaging from Faith in the UK and Finland

Women often embody the central values and practices of their religious trad-ition. When they leave their community, women find a part of the “religious tapestry” remaining with them long after their disengage-ment. In this article, we draw from research in the UK and Finland to explore women’s efforts to unlearn parts of their former religious belong-ing. We draw on in total thirty-five interviews with women who disengaged from the Mormon Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Conservative Laestadianism. We conceptualize un/learning as a multi-layered process consisting of both unlearning and re-learning. We explore women’s narratives about negotiating bodily limits, con-duct and belonging, and understand these as suggesting experiences of a threefold un/learn-ing: gendered, spatial-social and epistemic. We argue that examining gendered and embodied un/learning helps to understand women’s disengagement processes from minority Christian traditions in Western and Northern European secularized contexts such as the UK and Finland.</p

Catholic Women as Subjects of Debate:Thinking through a Gendered Religio-Racialised Location in Flanders

Through the analysis of empirical material that discusses women’s positions in religion in Flanders/Belgium, this article shows how local religion/secular dynamics are co-constituted by issues of race and gender. Starting from the premise that religious women’s (self-)positioning must be understood from a critical perspective on both secularity and race, we show how a.) mainstream secular and racialising discourses aim to discipline various religious subjects by using questions of gender justice, and b.) ethnically mainstream young Catholic women partially resist this by distinguishing themselves from religio-racialised others and producing whiteness. Based on our analysis, we argue for taking women’s self-positioning towards religious others seriously as shaping a gendered religio-racialised location. Thinking through the production of a gendered religio-racialised location reveals how white Christian normativity depends on performativity and is a gendered construct. As such, we demonstrate the need for further investigations of the co-constructions of race, religion and gender focusing on the perspectives and positions of those normally excluded from these critical discussions, namely ethnic majority Christians in Europe

Negotiating Religion: Cultural Representations of Conservative Protestant Women and Girls in Northern and Western Europe

This article analyses the production of gendered subjectivities in contemporary cultural representations of women and girls belonging to conservative protestant communities in Northern and Western Europe. We take the recent work of the Finnish and Dutch female novelists Pauliina Rauhala and Franca Treur as our case study. We explore how their novels represent the negotiations of women and girls from conservative protestant faiths and traditions. Approaching the novels as narratives of sense-making, we focus on notions of creativity and imagination, and gendered embodied experiences. Our analysis thus sheds light on contemporary understandings of women in conservative religions in contemporary Northern and Western Europe