In Religion, Gender and Citizenship: Women of Faith, Gender Equality and Feminism, Line Nyhagen and Beatrice Halsaa explore lived experiences of faith through interviews with Christian and Muslim women in Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom. Haje Keli welcomes this book as a vital intervention that does an excellent job of demonstrating how women of faith negotiate citizenship, belonging, religion, gender equality and feminism in their everyday lives

Keli, Haje

LSE Research Online

blogs.lse.ac.ukhttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2016/04/29/book-review-religion-gender-and-citizenship-women-of-faith-gender-equality-and-feminism-by-line-nyhagen-and-beatrice-halsaa/Book Review: Religion, Gender and Citizenship: Women of Faith,Gender Equality and Feminism by Line Nyhagen and BeatriceHalsaaIn Religion, Gender and Citizenship: Women of Faith, Gender Equality and Feminism,  Line Nyhagen andBeatrice Halsaa explore lived experiences of faith through interviews with Christian and Muslim women in Norway,Spain and the United Kingdom. Haje Keli welcomes this book as a vital intervention that does an excellent job ofdemonstrating how women of faith negotiate citizenship, belonging, religion, gender equality and feminism in theireveryday lives. Religion, Gender and Citizenship: Women of Faith, Gender Equality and Feminism. Line Nyhagen andBeatrice Halsaa. Palgrave Macmillan. 2016.While many books about religion and faith discuss theology or focus on the opinions ofthose who are viewed as spokespersons for their respective faiths, in Religion, Genderand Citizenship: Women of Faith, Gender Equality and Feminism the authors LineNyhagen and Beatrice Halsaa have chosen to speak to women who identify as Christian(Catholic, Lutheran and Pentecostal) and Muslim (Sunni and Shi’a). This approach isboth necessary and rare for a variety of reasons. The spokespersons representingfaiths are most often men, and they tend to rely heavily on written sources that say littleabout religious peoples’ everyday lives.In contrast, Religion, Gender and Citizenship brings women, both Muslim and Christian,to the forefront of discussions on faith and citizenship, which is highly necessary intimes of heightened xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe. Some might claim thatreligious women are closed off and retreat into their own communities, but in this bookwe see that women of faith eagerly engage with the researchers and open up abouttheir daily lives and engagements with religion. Nyhagen and Halsaa perceive the lackof representation for women of faith and seek to tackle this by interviewing 61 women of Muslim and Christian faithfrom the UK (Leicester), Spain (Madrid) and Norway (Oslo).This book not only allows women to share their own narratives in their own words, but also helpfully focuses onwomen’s lived religion through enquiring about their multi-layered identities and how they view citizenship withintheir contexts (see Chapter Four). Since the book goes ‘to the source’ by speaking to religious women directly, thereader is presented with new meanings of citizenship and of what it means to be a religious citizen in the respectivecountries. The book complements these empirical findings in Chapters One and Two, which describe the histories ofChristianity and Islam in the UK, Spain and Norway in relation to immigration and citizenship.Throughout the book there is a critique of mainstream feminist writing, as the authors feel this has failed to engagewith religious women; they affirm that women of faith need to be included in dialogues about women’s position insociety. The book advises against accusing religious women of ‘false consciousness’ (223) and shows that, for thewomen interviewed, religion also serves as a helpful factor in their lives. In Chapter Three, ‘Religious Identities andMeaning Making’, the authors recount how the participants feel that their faith has given them direction at difficulttimes and has offered them guidance and lucidity in their busy lives (105).1/3Image Credit: Woman in prayer (David Amsler)Chapter Six gives an indication of how much of a gap there can be between religious women and secular women, asonly one of the participants identified as a feminist (201). The authors present what they refer to as the dominantdiscourse among the participants, a discourse of ‘anti-feminism’, as the women characterised feminism to beextreme, excessive and immoderate. The participants feel that feminism is ‘man-hating’ and is driven by the aims ofpromoting gay rights, abortion, divorce and domination over men (202). This particular chapter could be beneficial forfeminist scholars as it is telling of how ‘feminist messages’ can be misinterpreted; perhaps a continued dialogueacross secular and religious lines could remedy these misunderstandings. However, while the women did not self-identify as feminist, many supported women’s rights and women’s struggles against inequality (204).Apart from the critique of current feminist scholarship, the book carries another important thread – themarginalisation and experienced ‘otherness’ of the Muslim participants. The authors note that Muslim women, wheninterviewed, often felt the need to ‘explain’ Islam and were ready to correct or defend any potential misconceptions(27-28). On the other hand, the Christian women often took for granted that the researchers had pre-existingknowledge of their faith and doctrines, and treated the researchers like insiders. The authors discuss the insider-outsider position as they recognise that the research process is informed by the researchers’ own positionalities.The authors state that all the researchers were from Christian backgrounds and were more familiar with Christianpractices rather than Islamic ones. Five of the six researchers were from a white non-migrant background, while thesixth was a black woman from a migrant background. Methodologically, this openness is crucial as it informsreaders of how the researchers read the field and how the participants were reading them.The Muslim women’s experiences of exclusion are juxtaposed with the responses of Christian women, who happento be predominantly white European. The Christian women do not bring up their ethnicity or nationality as importantmarkers of identity. This is highly interesting and relevant as, like the authors state, it indicates that questions ofidentity and belonging have not been ‘pushed on’ these women as has occurred with Muslim women of migrantbackgrounds (78-79). This theme flows throughout the book as a reminder that citizenship and identity for women isfluid, situational and can be contingent on one’s religion and ethnicity.It is somewhat disappointing that the book did not utilise an intersectional analysis of the material to a greater extent.It is not sufficient to merely write that one is going to make use of intersectionality as a tool: there has to actually be athorough analysis using an intersectional lens to view women’s privileges and disadvantages. The authors could2/3have written more about the social categories that lie at the base of intersectional analysis, and discussed at whattimes certain categories come to the forefront while others are pushed back. Each social category could have beenfurther elucidated to explain the intersections of subjugation and privilege. There could have, for instance, beenseparate paragraphs about gender, class, social status, ethnicity and language proficiency, and a further analysis ofhow these different categories intersect and to what degree. There could also have been more engagement with thevariances and consistencies between the two groups of women, as the authors tend to discuss the Christian womenseparately from the Muslim women. Ideally, a more holistic view of all the religious women’s views could have beenpresented. Indeed, when the book does engage with both Muslim and Christian women’s standpoints and looks attheir lives comparatively, it adds interesting nuance to the material.In summary, Religion, Gender and Citizenship is an important intervention in the topic of religious women and theireveryday lives. It does not rely on religious texts or rituals to reach conclusions, but rather takes an honest look atreligious woman from three European countries and how they identify with faith, how they utilise it and how theyposition themselves with regards to feminism and gender equality. The book does an excellent job of demonstratinghow women negotiate citizenship, belonging, faith and the issue of how to relate to both women of different faithsand secular women. The book begins by clarifying how women identify themselves, and ends with how religious andnon-religious women can find common ground through constructive dialogue, all the while being conscious of theimbalance between the status of Muslim women from migrant backgrounds and Christian women from white non-migrant backgrounds.Haje Keli is a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London. Her topics of interest are feminist theory, gender theoryand religious studies. Her research is on gender-based violence in Iraqi Kurdistan, with a focus on female genitalcutting and other forms of violence against women due to familial, social and state involvement.Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of theLondon School of Economics.Copyright 2013 LSE Review of Books3/3

Book review: religion, gender and citizenship: women of faith, gender equality and feminism by Line Nyhagen and Beatrice Halsaa

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