Postsecular Feminisms

Postsecular Feminisms explores the contested relationship between feminism and secularism through a series of case studies, featuring perspectives from the global North and South. It offers insights beyond those of the Abrahamic traditions, and includes multiple examples from South Asia. By decentering the European experience, Postsecular Feminisms shows how secularism and feminism have been constituted in North America, South Asia, and Anglophone West Africa. The book asks: can postsecular feminism offer a way to think about religion and gender so as to support women in all the variety of their lived experiences? The contributors show that postsecular feminism is a variety of feminism that is not necessarily either secularist or anti-secular. Rather it is feminism informed by a history of secularist bias within liberal feminism. Postsecular Feminisms explores both the potentials and pitfalls of postsecular feminisms, with some authors arguing that a contextually grounded praxis is possible, while others make a strong case against postsecular feminism as theory and practice.

Postsecular Feminisms explores the contested relationship between feminism and secularism through a series of case studies, featuring perspectives from the global North and South. It offers insights beyond those of the Abrahamic traditions, and includes multiple examples from South Asia. By decentering the European experience, Postsecular Feminisms shows how secularism and feminism have been constituted in North America, South Asia, and Anglophone West Africa. The book asks: can postsecular feminism offer a way to think about religion and gender so as to support women in all the variety of their lived experiences? The contributors show that postsecular feminism is a variety of feminism that is not necessarily either secularist or anti-secular. Rather it is feminism informed by a history of secularist bias within liberal feminism. Postsecular Feminisms explores both the potentials and pitfalls of postsecular feminisms, with some authors arguing that a contextually grounded praxis is possible, while others make a strong case against postsecular feminism as theory and practice.

In 'Feminist Trouble', Éléonore Lépinard draws on extended fieldwork with numerous women's organizations in France and Quebec. Giving voice to devout women and women of colour, Lépinard dissects hierarchies of privilege in feminist politics, grappling with Islam and Islamic veiling debates to understand how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectional politics, and the feminist collective subject.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY NC ND 4.0 International license. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Feminism is in trouble. For more than two decades, Islamic veils, niqabs, and burkinis, forced and arranged marriages, polygamy and Sharia rules concerning women have been the object of intense public scrutiny and legal regulations in many Western countries, especially in Europe, and feminists have been actively engaged on both sides of the debates. In Feminist Trouble, Éléonore Lépinard draws on extended fieldwork with numerous women's organizations in France and Quebec. Giving voice to women of color and white women, Lépinard dissects hierarchies of privilege, in particular whiteness, in feminist politics, grappling with Islam and Islamic veiling debates to understand how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectional politics, and the feminist collective subject. A critical look at feminism, its divisions, and its future, Feminist Trouble argues that feminism should not be centered around an identity-women-but should instead focus on a feminist ethic of responsibility which reckons with power asymmetries and requires women to prioritize their ethical responsibility to the feminist project.

Sojourner Truth and Intersectionality investigates how the story of the 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Sojourner Truth has come to be an iconic feminist story, and explores the continued relevance of this story for contemporary feminist debates in general, and intersectionality scholarship in particular. Tracing various academic reception histories of the story of Sojourner Truth and the famous "Ain’t I a Woman?" speech, the book gives insight into how this story has been taken up by feminist scholars in different times, places, and political contexts. Exploring in particular how and why the story of Sojourner Truth has become a key reference for the theoretical and political framework of intersectionality, the book examines what the consequences of this connection are both for how intersectionality is understood today, and how the story of Sojourner Truth is approached. The book examines key intersecting dimensions within the story of Truth and its reception, including gender, race, class and religion. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in gender, women’s and feminist studies. In particular, the book will be of interest to those wishing to learn more about intersectionality and Sojourner Truth.

"For more than two decades Islamic veils, niqabs, burkinis, have been the object of intense public scrutiny and legal regulations in many Western countries, especially in Europe, and feminists have been actively engaged on both sides of the debates: defending ardently strict prohibitions to ensure Muslim women's emancipation, or, by contrast, promoting accommodation in the name of women's religious agency and a more inclusive feminist movement. These recent developments have unfolded in a context of rising right-wing populism in Europe and have fueled "femonationalism", i.e. the instrumentalization of women's rights for xenophobic agendas. This book proposes to explore this contemporary troubled context for feminism, its current divisions and its future. It investigates how these changes have transformed contemporary feminist movements, intersectionality politics, and the feminist collective subject, and how feminists have been enrolled in the femonationalist project or, conversely, have resisted it in two contexts: France and Québec. It provides new empirical data on contemporary feminist activists, as well as a critical normative argument about the subject and future of feminism. It makes a contribution to intersectionality theory by reflecting on the dynamics of convergence and difference between race and religion. At the normative level, the book provides an original addition to vivid debates in feminist political theory and philosophy on the subject of feminism. It argues that feminism is better understood not as centered around an identity -women -, but around what it calls a feminist ethic of responsibility, which foregrounds a pragmatist moral approach to the feminist project"--

This book provides a conceptual, historical and contemporary context to the relationships between gender, religion and cities. It draws together these three components to provide an innovative view of how religion and gender interact and affect urban form and city planning. While there have been many books that deal with religion and cities; gender and cities; and gender and religion, this book is unique in bringing these three subjects together. This trio of inter-relationships is first explored within Western Christianity: in Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy and in the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. A wider perspective is then provided in chapters on the ways in which Islam shapes urban development and influences the position of Muslim women in urban space. While official religions have declined in the West there is still a desire for new forms of spirituality, and this is discussed in chapters on municipal spirituality and on the rise of paganism and the links to both environmentalism and feminism. Finally, ways of taking into account both gender and religion within the statutory urban planning system are presented. This book will be of great interest to those researching environment and gender, urban planning and sustainability, human geography and religion.

Although demographically a minority in Kerala, India, Syrian Christians are not a subordinated community. They are caste-, race-, and class-privileged, and have long benefitted, both economically and socially, from their privileged position. Focusing on Syrian Christian women, Sonja Thomas explores how this community illuminates larger questions of multiple oppressions, privilege and subordination, racialization, and religion and secularism in India. In Privileged Minorities, Thomas examines a wide range of sources, including oral histories, ethnographic interviews, and legislative assembly debates, to interrogate the relationships between religious rights and women�s rights in Kerala. Using an intersectional approach, and US women of color feminist theory, she demonstrates the ways that race, caste, gender, religion, and politics are inextricably intertwined, with power and privilege working in complex and nuanced ways. By attending to the ways in which inequalities within groups shape very different experiences of religious and political movements in feminist and rights-based activism, Thomas lays the groundwork for imagining new feminist solidarities across religions, castes, races, and classes.