Final accepted version 14 Feb 2019_Contestations of Feminism, Secularism and Religion_NJRS_Nyhagen.pdf (245.22 kB)
Contestations of feminism, secularism and religion in the West: the discursive othering of religious and secular women
Secular and religious women have a history of fighting for women’s rights and gender equality. Yet, contemporary feminist and women’s movements in the West are largely understood as secular, and as rejecting religion, and religion is often perceived as the antithesis of empowerment and emancipation. In this article I problematise the relationship between feminism, secularism and religion via a discussion of secular feminist views on women and religion, and religious women’s views on secular feminism. Bringing together previously separate strands of work, this article provides an original analysis of how both secular feminist women and non-feminist religious women engage in discursive articulations of Othering, constructing inferior subjects who are (dis-)placed outside the boundary of ‘women like us’. Such discursive representations, which are rooted in perceptions of feminism and religion as unitary and static, contribute to the construction and maintenance of sharp boundaries between secular and religious women, thus hindering the potential for dialogue and collaboration in support of women’s rights and gender equality.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Nordic Journal of Religion and SocietyVolume
32Issue
1/2019Pages
4-21Citation
NYHAGEN, L., 2019. Contestations of feminism, secularism and religion in the West: the discursive othering of religious and secular women. Nordic Journal of Religion and Society, 32 (1/2019), pp.4-21.Publisher
UniversitetsforlagetVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2019-02-14Publication date
2019-05-21Notes
This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Nordic Journal of Religion and Society and the definitive published version is available at https://www.idunn.no/nordic_journal_of_religion_and_society/2019/01ISSN
0809-7291Publisher version
Language
- en