For more information: katrien.degraeve@ugent.be; or webpage Katrien De Graeve

In post-9/11 Western societies and academic debates, the notion that religion and women’s emancipation are fundamentally conflicting has regained plausibility. Consequently, women’s deliberate religious conversions are a pertinent academic, religious and socio-political issue. In face of this religion/emancipation paradox, this research project will apply interdisciplinary methods to study women’s processes of conversion as the acquisition of new religious subjectivities in which gender and sexuality play a formative role. The project hypothesises that gender equality and women’s sexuality are ‘battlefields’ on which converting women negotiate their position and subjectivity. It assumes that the conversion process is notably acted out in the context of public debates and religious prescriptions that highlight women’s positions and sexualities in adversative directions. By studying female conversion as an ongoing and multi-layered negotiation between secular and religious gender discourses, the project develops an innovative model of interpretation, based on a diversification of notions of choice, embodiment and religion. Its operationalisation takes place through three subprojects: a qualitative empirical PhD research on women’s embodied conversion processes in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; a postdoctoral cultural analysis of British, Dutch and Flemish public debates on controversies about traditional religious groups, gender and sexuality; and a postdoctoral religious studies approach investigating women’s positions and practices as narrated and regulated within Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. This comparative interdisciplinary project will contribute substantially to the public and academic understandings of tensions between religious and secular gender discourses through in-depth analysis of the experiences of women positioned at the intersection of both. The project includes three subprojects based on three different approaches. The innovative combination of approaches (qualitative empirical, cultural analytical, and religious studies) is indispensable for answering the empirical and theoretical questions of the project at large.

For more information about this project, contact religionandgender@gmail.com or h.p.vandenbrandt@uu.nl. Nella will remain affiliated with CRCG.

 

- Dierckx, Myrte, Dimitri Mortelmans, Joz Motmans & Guy T’Sjoen (2016), 'Families in transition: A literature review', International Review of Psychiatry, 28(1):1-8. . 

- Wojniusz, Slawomir*, Nina Callens*, Stefan Sütterlin, Stein Andersson, Jean De Schepper, Inge Gies, Jesse Vanbesien, Kathleen De Waele, Sara Van Aken, Margarita Craen, Claus Vögele, Martine Cools & Ira R. Haraldsen (2016). 'Cognitive, Emotional, and Psychosocial Functioning of Girls Treated with Pharmacological Puberty Blockage for Idiopathic Central Precocious Puberty'. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, article 1053, 1 -12

[*joint first authorship]
 

- Brinkman, Inge, Mirjam de Bruin, and Hisham Bilal (2016), ‘The Mobile Phone, "Modernity", and Change in Khartoum, Sudan’, in Mirjam de Bruin, Francis Nyamnjoh, and Inge Brinkman (eds.), Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa (African Studies Centre, 2009), pp. 69–91.' Reprint in: Gerard Goggin, Rich Ling, Larissa Hjorth (eds.), Mobile Technologies: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, (Routledge, Taylor Francis, 2016) Vol 2. 94-114.

- Rahbari, Ladan (2016), 'Sexuality in Iran'. In Constance L. Shehan (Ed.), the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Family Studies, Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, pp.  1769-1772

Religion and Gender is the first online, peer reviewed, international and open access journal for the systematic study of gender and religion in an interdisciplinary perspective. The journal aims to explore the relation, confrontation and intersection of gender and religion, taking into account the multiple and changing manifestations of religion in diverse social and cultural contexts. It analyses and reflects critically on gender in its interpretative and imaginative dimensions and as a fundamental principle of social ordering. It seeks to investigate gender at the intersections of feminist, sexuality, queer, masculinity and diversity studies.

As an academic journal, Religion and Gender targets an interdisciplinary academic audience but also aims to be accessible to those with a non-professional interest in the field. The journal publishes high level contributions from the Humanities and from qualitative and conceptual studies in the Social Sciences. It wants to focus in particular on contemporary debates and topics of emerging interest from postmodern, postcolonial, and post-secular perspectives.