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

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

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 tradition. When they leave their community, women find a part of the “religious tapestry” remaining with them long after their disengagement. In this article, we draw from research in the UK and Finland to explore women’s efforts to unlearn parts of their former religious belonging. 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 un-learning and re-learning. We explore women’s narratives about negotiating bodily limits, conduct and belonging, and understand these as suggesting experiences of a threefold un/learning: 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