In August 2013 a pregnant mother of three was physically assaulted in Farsta, a suburb of Stockholm. A man, unacquainted with the victim, grabbed her hijab, the Muslim headscarf, shouted ‘people like you should not be here,’ and bumped her head against a car so hard that she lost consciousness. The incident prompted five women to launch a hijab-upprop (‘hijab call-to-action’ in Swedish), exhorting ‘all co-sisters in Sweden—religious and non-religious’ to veil themselves (cover their heads) for one day in order to show solidarity with all Muslim women who endure violence and harassment. 1 The call received a massive response and social media was flooded with images of women from all backgrounds, among them several politicians, wearing a hijab. The activists who initiated the call were given attention in newspapers and on TV, thus managing to make the violence and discrimination directed toward Muslim women in Swedish society more visible. They also demanded that stronger measures be taken by the responsible authorities to tackle discrimination, and for a short period of time, Muslim women’s own voices were being heard on the significance of wearing veils. At the same time there were also critical voices expressing the view that the veil is a symbol of women’s oppression; therefore, using the veil in defense of women’s rights would be contradictory.
The events leading up to Sweden’s hijab call-to-action constitute familiar scenes in most European countries. Muslim minorities, often symbolically represented by the veiled Muslim woman, have become the main target of racist and anti-migration forces in Western Europe, who employ Islamophobic discourses to define boundaries of belonging (see Sauer, this volume). The debate in Sweden should be seen in the context of a growing awareness of the existence of racism in a country whose self-image has been built on tolerance and equality. This self-image has been torn down in recent years, exemplified by international media reports on the burning suburbs outside Stockholm, where second- or third-generation migrants defied police. The rise of a right-wing populist party as the third-largest political party in the Swedish Parliament following the 2014 elections, a party that repeatedly attacks Islamic culture, finally crushed the idea that Sweden could be an exemption to the political developments in the rest of Europe.
Yet seen from a comparative perspective, as elaborated by Birgit Sauer in her analysis of the headscarf debates (this volume), Sweden qualifies as a ‘tolerant’ country regarding headscarf (and related) politics. The country’s jurisdiction clearly supports Muslim women’s right to wear the hijab in public, a view that has been supported with fervor by leading Swedish politicians, in contrast to France, for example.
However, the hijab call-to-action did something more than manifest solidarity between natives and migrants in Sweden, something of particular interest to this volume. It was a manifestation of a new relationship between feminism and religion in Sweden. To the multiple meanings that have been ascribed to the Muslim veil, yet another was added: donning a veil came to signify a manifestation of feminist solidarity and sisterhood between secular feminists and religious women. The call addressed women in the name of feminist sisterhood, and female politicians (among them the feminist Gudrun Schyman, leader of a feminist party) responded by wearing a veil for the day. This scenario makes it clear that feminism and religion can no longer be seen as non-connected spheres. This new relationship between feminism and religion has contributed to important shifts in the academic understanding of religion and to the ‘new’ relationship between feminist studies and studies of religion that will be explored by the contributors to this volume.
This account of the Swedish hijab call-to-action gives a snapshot of the ways in which Muslim women and their bodies and clothing have been placed at the center of public debates in Europe about the nexus of politics and religion. In important ways these debates form the background of what has been labeled the post-secular turn in the academy. This turn involves a questioning of earlier theories assuming that religion would gradually (continue to) lose importance as a social force in Europe and in the rest of the world. It implies instead that new theoretical frames are required to grasp what ‘religion’ is and will be in contemporary societies and how it is related to ‘secularism’, a project that has engaged a wide number of scholars (Casanova 1994; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Asad et al. 2009).
Moreover, and key to the topics explored in this volume, the Swedish hijab call-to-action follows a logic similar to the ways in which feminist studies have responded to the post-secular turn. It is through the so-called ‘clash of civilizations debate’ and the context of global politics that feminism and feminist scholarship have turned their attention to religion. Rosi Braidotti (2008) argues that the post-secular turn challenges European feminism because it makes manifest that a one-sided identification with a secular critique of religion, one that feminism has generally been committed to historically, risks being joined to anti-feminist forces. Instead, feminism and feminist studies need to recognize a more nuanced scenario in which religious women can be political subjects and sisters in need of solidarity. This standpoint sums up the position of the Swedish hijab call-to-action and of the feminists supporting it. It is also in keeping with the dominant intersectional approach in Western feminist studies, which sees religious affiliation as one more aspect of identity that feminism needs to take into account in its handling of the specificities of a woman’s experience. As we will discuss further in this chapter, however, the integration of the study of religion to gender studies goes beyond the mere adding of another identity marker, such as the ‘religious woman’ (like race/ethnicity, class, ableness, or sexual orientation), to the mix of an intersectional analysis.
In this introduction, we will discuss how the particularities of the historical moment in which feminist studies address religion have several implications for the field of study. The aim is to readdress the relationship between feminist studies and studies of religion in different ways, notably by linking different theoretical veins and offering retrospectives on the evolution of the field.
Double Blindness and Continuities
In this volume we have gathered a group of scholars who research gender and religion with a focus on contemporary Europe. Our contribution seeks to highlight the significance of gender as empirical reality in the multiple expressions and formations of religion in contemporary society as well as a critical theoretical perspective working across disciplines. Our research group reflects the current need for interdisciplinary dialogue at a time when boundaries between disciplines and established theoretical approaches in both gender and religion are being challenged. The following disciplines are represented in this collection: anthropology, gender studies, history of religions, human geography, history, sociology, and theology.
In addressing the current encounter between feminist studies and studies of religion, we wish to readdress attention to the so-called double blindness in this area of research (King 2005). Until recently, the relationship between the study of gender and the study of religion has been marked by the blindness of one field to the other: a lack of interest in religion on the part of gender studies and the absence of gender perspectives in the study of religion. The effects and legacies of this double blindness, which will be further discussed below, also shape our encounters in the present moment.
In the following, we will link some of the issues that are important for the study of gender and religion to these contemporary debates while emphasizing continuities wherever relevant (see Dubisch; Vuola; Utriainen, this volume).
‘The Religious Woman’: A Return from the Margins
Feminist studies’ lack of interest in the study of religion has been manifested in many ways, for instance in its absence as a theme for discussion at conferences and in feminist journals. 2 Although this absence is now being addressed as feminist studies engage with the post-secular turn in the academy, the location of feminist studies of religion within a feminist academy is far from self-evident. Therefore, it is relevant to repeat the reasons why feminist studies should show an interest in religion, or, from the perspective of scholars of gender and religion, why it would be more appropriate to ask how feminist studies in the first place have been able to shut their eyes to religious realities, a question equally relevant even before religion became a ‘hot topic’ in the academy. The reasons are both simple and varied: the majority of the world’s women practice some form of religion; therefore, feminism’s blindness to this fact must be seen as one more way in which Western feminism excludes perspectives important to non-Western women, a key concern within current feminist theory. On the other hand, if religion, as feminist theory has argued, is one of the most powerful ideological tools that underpins patriarchal normative views of gender and sexuality, it should be given due critical attention. These are two of the primary reasons, but before taking a closer look at the current shift in which feminism dons the veil and enters the worlds of religion, so to speak, we need to look at the ideas that prompted the earlier study of gender and religion.
Until the 1980s the view of religion, as presented in religious studies, social anthropology, and the sociology of religion, was still one in which women were largely invisible and a gender perspective was completely absent. From the 1980s, and most notably in the 1990s, a growing number of feminist scholars pointed out that this neglect had led to serious distortions in the understanding of religion. Due to the earlier neglect of women, a range of studies focused on interpreting women’s involvement in different religious systems with the result that new theoretical frameworks evolved (e.g. Holden 1983; Bynum et al. 1986; Falk and Gross 1989; King 1995a). The feminist studies of gender and religion carried out in the 1980s and 1990s had to deconstruct the misogynistic symbolic language identified in various religious traditions of the world. Simultaneously, however, an equally important theoretical project was launched: to explore the many ways in which women actively created their own religious lives. A focus on women as religious actors grew in response to the predominant view that religious women were passive victims of religious ideologies, an approach in which the distinction between Woman as symbol and women as religious actors proved to be important (Sered 1999). The presence of Woman as symbol in cross-cultural religious systems, often understood in negative terms, had stood in the way of understanding real women’s involvement in religion. When making women’s active role in religion visible, perspectives developed that changed both the view of ‘the religious woman’ and the way the particular religious traditions under study were conceived and theorized (e.g. Bynum 1986; Dubisch 1983, 1991, 1995; Sered 1992, 1994). It is instructive to look at how these ideas were articulated in Jill Dubisch’s influential interpretation of Greek women’s religious lives.
Ethnographic studies of Greece carried out in the 1960s and 1970s were important in shaping the analytical framework used to interpret Mediterranean cultures in terms of honor and shame. In the 1980s the model of honor and shame was subject to a massive critique in which feminist anthropology played a major role. Although the discussion did not address religion directly, the cultural construction of honor and shame was widely accepted as resting on the worldview and understanding of gender and sexuality advocated by the major religious traditions of the region, namely Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy, and Islam. The code of honor and shame implicates the idea that ‘[w]omen are weaker, more prone to sin, bearing the burden for the destructive power of sexuality’ (Dubisch 1995, 197).
Dubisch’s study of Greek women’s devotion to the Virgin Mary, the Panayía, questions this prevalent negative image of women. At the center of her study is the female pilgrim crawling on her knees up to the Greek national Marian shrine in Tinos. In the eyes of Western feminism, these women seem to represent the very stereotype of ‘the religious woman’ subordinated to a patriarchal religion. Contrary to such a view, Dubisch argues that the act of crawling can be seen as a dramatic performance of womanhood, of ‘being good at being a woman’ (1995, 209). The suffering and emotion on display express the burdens and the struggle that Greek women as mothers and wives are willing to take on in order to secure the well-being of their families. Dubisch stresses that these performances cannot be seen as marginal to Greek religion, for they are played out in a public place at the center of Greek culture and are integral to its religious tradition. Greek women’s religious life cannot be seen as muted participation in a male-controlled institution, as earlier studies suggested. Women’s religious performances involve a creative expression of self that Dubisch terms a ‘poetics of womanhood’ (1995, 208–212).
In this study, then, we find some of the major themes in the study of gender and religion as it has evolved during the last decades. Out of the focus on women grew an emphasis on women as religious actors, closely related to issues of power, such as the power to express oneself religiously, strivings for religious author...