Introduction to narrating bodies
Nella van den, Mariecke van den Berg, Megan Milota, Nawal Mustafa, and Matthea Westerduin
In this section we explore narratives of embodied transformation: that of healthy bodies into sick bodies, of bodies that move from one gender expression to another, bodies moving into or within religious traditions, and those that participate in processes of intersubjective change. We like to start our introduction with a brief note on methodology. Although the focus on narrative is the common thread, we approach the relation between narrative and the body using different methodologies, depending on our material and main research concerns. In her analysis, Nella van den Brandt creatively combines conceptual frameworks from anthropology, religious studies, and conversion studies in order to analyse memoirs as a particular form of storytelling that reflects everyday life but simultaneously as a social process and an act of subject-formation and meaning-making. As conversion storytelling can abide to, negotiate with, or subvert dominant expectations about religion, ethnicity, and gender, the memoirs are considered to be embedded in relations of power and difference. Mariecke van den Berg creates a dialogue between two âfields for the study of changeâ, namely transgender studies and conversion studies, and uses this conversation in her analysis of autobiography. Transgender studies and conversion studies relate to the body-in-transition in different ways, and both are needed if one wants to understand how gender and religious transformations are often related. Megan Milota departs from the literary studies concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom, in order to explore the ways in which literature can shape a readerâs ethical stance. In addition, she draws from the overlapping academic fields of narrative ethics and narrative medicine to illustrate why thinking about and with stories constitute a form of ethical engagement. Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin use the concept of transformative conversation in order to theorise the lack of engagement with particular types of knowledge within academia. They illustrate the depth and insights that can be drawn from religious knowledge when, and if, politicised in a particular way. In their contribution they show the similarities and the differences of their own experiences as both gendered and racialised.
These four chapters make clear how in autobiographical narratives, different transformations are often related. In his illness pathography, When Breath Becomes Air â which is analysed in Megan Milotaâs chapter â author and neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi describes the transformation of his vital body into a terminally ill body and links this to his newly developed religious perspective. For the women whose memoires are discussed in the chapter by Nella van den Brandt, religious conversion implies new negotiations with gendered bodies and erotic desires. Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin show in their self-narratives how transformation occurs through interaction, comparison, and reflection based on their similar but different experiences. Their chapter can be seen as a theoretical reflection and as transformation in practice. For the authors of the autobiographies discussed in the chapter by Mariecke van den Berg, the process of gender transformation or confusion is accompanied by religious relocations within Judaism. A primary observation that can be made on the basis of this section is therefore that existential human transformation often plays out simultaneously on different interrelated spheres of life: it is related to experiences of the body, religious traditions, gender, and desire.
A second observation is that transformation does not happen in a vacuum; it does not only pertain to the individual subject of transformation. Obviously, significant human transformations, such as the ones we are dealing with in these chapters, also affect the people who are close to the ones undergoing transformation. However, we here also (and perhaps more so) refer to an understanding that transitions related to health, religion, and gender are not neutral. They take place in social, political, and religious contexts that ascribe all kinds of meaning to old and new selves, old and new communities, old and new worldviews. van den Brandt, for instance, discusses the experiences of women who convert to Judaism and Islam, and who therefore share the experience of moving into what in the context of Western Europe are minority religions. It does matter, however, that Islam and Judaism are perceived very differently by mainstream society. The conversion memoirs show that while room for diversity and pluralism is recognised when it comes to Judaism, Islam is often thought to be much more monolithic. The chapter by van den Berg shows that processes of gender transformation or confusion not only destabilise notions of femininity and masculinity but may also be an occasion for the generation of new and inclusive theological perspectives. Along the same line, Mustafa and Westerduin explore in their chapter how specific advantages and disadvantages are allocated to themselves as individuals due to their different positions in terms of gender, race, and religion. They show how the representation of both Christianity as well as Islam does not always align with their own experiences and expertise of their respective religion. They moreover demonstrate how the notion of displacement, especially in academia, led to the start of their conversation and essentially enabled themselves to transform. The chapter by Milota demonstrates that Kalanithiâs transition from successful neurosurgeon to cancer patient also implies a transition from a respected position in a âGreyâs Anatomyâ-like lifeworld to that of a largely anonymous and disempowered patient. As such, human embodied transformations, while experienced primarily individually, are embedded in much wider social structures of power and related subject positions, and societal, communal, or academic mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The âtransformersâ in our chapters are conscious of the fact that their transformations are normatively charged, and they take the general conventions that they expect to exist about their transformations into account in the narratives they construct. They âtalk backâ to dominant and sometimes stigmatising assumptions about their religion (van den Brandt), gender identity (van den Berg), or position on the margins of a health-dominated society (Milota). Mustafa and Westerduin are themselves part of a process of intersubjective transformation. Their chapter reflects on the way in which their transformative experience is embedded in, and speaks back to, dynamics of gender, religion, and race.
A third observation is that our chapters describe various ways in which narratives of transformation can be considered potential tools for change. By going public with their stories, the âtransformersâ in our chapters share a search for witnesses who are willing to read, sympathise, be moved, and eventually have their thoughts and actions changed by these narratives of transformation. Our chapters therefore raise questions about the ethics and politics of transformation: how do narratives of embodied transformation incite notions of living a âgoodâ or âdevoutâ life? How do gender transition and religious conversion potentially form a critique of established notions of gendered or racialised religious subjectivities? How do we draw inspiration from the richness of religion while we attempt to critique it? Can our differences lead to transformation when in critical dialogue? And finally, how do narratives of transformation shed light on a diversity of experiences of individual subjects in, to, and across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam?
In this part of the volume, we thus turn to narratives of transformation as disruptive accounts that hold the potential to be tools for change. Yet we also acknowledge that there are limits to this âdisruptive potentialâ. In order to be intelligible, the authors discussed in or of our chapters need to relate to the very conventions they often set out to criticise. Moreover, they need to relate to narrative conventions, especially when operating, as they do, in the specific genre of life writing. Their narratives of change therefore need to relate to literary and storytelling conventions of what change should look like, how it should come about, how it should be experienced, and how it should be narrated. The plot is never only in the hands of the person who tells the story. In our chapters, then, we explore moments of disruption as well as of affirming conventions.
As a final observation, it is worth noting that these chapters have all chosen the body as a particular locus of attention. As van den Berg argues in her chapter, the genre of life writing has been rather âdisembodiedâ for a long time, but this is currently changing. Many individuals whose bodies have not been represented equally over the course of history are now choosing precisely these disenfranchised bodies as a point of departure for telling their stories. Often, we found, the âtransformersâ we analyse, and sometimes we ourselves as transformers, want to address norms and conventions that are played out on the body, just as the body also forms a site of resistance and negotiation.
4Negotiating transformation and difference
Womenâs stories of conversion to Judaism and Islam
Introduction
I muse on my complicated relationship to God⌠. This is how I must live if I am to find peace, bringing together the holy and the profane.
(Mann 2007, 324â326)
During this time I came to understand a lot about myself, human beings, faith and the meaning of marriage and friendship. Human beings will always disappoint. But God is there.
(Backer 2016, 364)
Stories have a habit of generating stories. They come to nest, one inside the other, like Matryoshka dolls, each a window into anotherâs world⌠. Our lives are storied. Were it not for stories, our lives would be unimaginable. Stories make it possible for us to overcome our separatedness, to find common ground and common cause.
(Jackson 2013, 229; 240)
The first two quotations are taken from memoirs written by women who live in different Western European contexts and turned to Judaism and Islam. Reva Mannâs memoir, The Rabbiâs Daughter, tells the story of the daughter of a liberal rabbi becoming strictly Orthodox; Kristiane Backerâs memoir, From MTV to Mecca, narrates her moving from a lifeworld of show business to becoming Muslim. The last quotation is taken from The Politics of Storytelling by anthropologist Michael Jackson. Together, the quotations convey some of the themes that are of interest to many scholars of religious conversion: conversion as a trajectory that includes changing perceptions of identity and the self, as well as shifting relationships with others, God, and different realms of life. But also: conversion as a story with a âsocial lifeâ (Jackson 2013, 227) as being influenced by and influencing other stories and other lives.
In this chapter, I contribute to discussions about religion, storytelling, identity, subject-formation, and conversion, by drawing upon an analysis of four recent memoirs written by women who turn to Judaism and Islam. The analysis focuses on the ways in which female converts to Judaism and Islam negotiate their faith, transform their everyday life, and learn to inhabit social relations in new ways. This comparative analysis is relevant for various reasons. For one, the gendered experience of conversion is rarely studied from a cross-religious perspective. Second, focusing on two minority traditions in Western European contexts enables gaining comparative insights into multiple majority-minority relationships. In what follows, I first conceptualise stories of conversion by drawing from discussions about storytelling in religious studies and anthropology, and connecting these insights to conversion studies. Next, I introduce and analyse four memoirs by critically utilising the concepts syncretism and symbolic battle (Wohlrab-Sahr 1999), in order to look at the ways in which female converts narrate their past commitments and selves and their current religious environment. In conclusion, I draw attention to the different ways in which conversion to Judaism and Islam is politicised in Western European contexts.
Conversion stories
Authors across the humanities and social sciences have pointed at the centrality of narrative and storytelling for constructing subjectsâ sense of self and being-in-the-world. Subjects tell and live stories that, according to theologian Ruard Ganzevoort (2014), simultaneously invite and serve them to see the world in a certain way and act accordingly. The interaction with the religious tradition to which subjects belong is crucial as the latter âoffer[s] possible worlds, created through narrative and portrayed in stories and symbols, rituals and moral guidelinesâ (Ganzevoort 2014, 1). In pluralistic and individualised Western European contexts, life stories and narrative constructions of the self can be approached as an important medium through which to study the manifestation and functions of religion. Religious studies scholars Marjo Buitelaar and Hetty Zock push such âself-narrativesâ forward as an important opportunity to study the presence of religious voices (2013, 3). Anthropologist Michael Jackson argues for a cross-cultural understanding of what he calls the ânarrative imperativeâ as both social-political and existential. In his theorisation that departs from, and revises, the work of Hannah Arendt (1958), storytelling is considered a strategy for transforming private into public meanings, and vice versa. It is simultaneously âa vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstancesâ (2013, 34). Jackson explains that â[t]o reconstitute events in a story is no longer to live those events in passivity, but to actively rework them, both in dialogue with others and within oneâs own imaginationâ (2013, 34). Conversion can be considered as such a disempowering circumstance: it refers to an often slow and gradual, sometimes rapid, religious and social transformation that may unsettle an individual life trajectory, since it forces one to learn to inhabit new ways of being in relationship to oneself, the community one belongs to, and God. In such a context of change, according to Jackson, stories may help people to discern and determine the meaning of our journey through life. A conversion story is precisely that: a story about âwhere we came from and where we are goingâ (2013, 36). This conceptualisation of conversion stories seems close to philosopher Charles Taylorâs emphasis on the connection between notions of the self, narrative, and the ethical or religious realm:
Our lives exists in this space of questions, which only a coherent narrative can answer. In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going.
(1992, 47)
However, while conversion can indeed be a disempowering circumstance, it might as easily be experienced as an empowering one: conversion can open up towards new, or expanded, horizons of thought, imagination, and action. And while Jackson emphasises the function of storytelling as a way of coping with crisis, stalemate, or loss of ground, enabling us to ârenew our faith that the world is within our graspâ (2013, 36), as this chapter will show, stories of conversion can also be about giving up a notion of control over oneâs life. This giving up of full autonomy takes place through giving in to Godâs calling or a desire to belong elsewhere, no matter the uncertainties tied to it. Notwithstanding these remarks on the applicability of Jacksonâs framework for the study of conversion stories, I agree with his claim that we need to understand and explore storytelling as a social process and an act of meaning-making (2013, 34â41). In what follows, I discuss stories of conversion not as âtextsâ (which is the work of literary theory) but as stories embodied by subjects who participate in the full stream of their social and religious lives, embedded in webs of power relations. As such, stories of conversion are âproduced in social cont...
