How does religion continue to shape contemporary societies, even in seemingly secular contexts? How do gender, sexuality, and activism intersect with religious and secular divides? And how can scholars navigate and critically engage with these complexities in a postsecular world?

This event explores these questions in two parts:

First, the presentation of the book “Gender and Postsecularity in Visual Culture and Knowledge Production” (Eds.: Boka En, Sabine Grenz, Doris Guth, Fatma Uysal) will introduce a volume that brings together a novel approach to the debate on  the increased visibility of religious practices and belongings across the globe by bringing together debates on religious representations in popular culture and society. Previously marginalized in gender studies, the secular and the religious now attract growing interest in academic and activist feminism, prompting a critical reflection on secularity’s emancipatory potential. This publication aims to foster this interest by providing a platform for interdisciplinary and transregional discussions on the complex dynamics of secularity, religiosity, and gender, as well as new approaches to exploring these relationships. The contributions examine the entanglements and boundaries of religions and secularities in everyday life, art, culture, and knowledge production. By presenting relevant case studies, this book underscores an understanding of religion as both a category of knowledge and a marker of identity.

In the second part, a roundtable discussion next to yet unpublished contributions, two more recent publications will be presented: The book Holy Rebellion by Tanya Zion-Waldoks and a special issue of Religion & Gender on Complex Intricacies of Gender, Secularities and Religiosities, by Sabine Grenz and Mia Liinason. The discussion will touch on a wide range of issues such as religious feminisms, the far-right’s entanglement with religious identity and militarized masculinity, interreligious relationships and agency, and critical activism within religious communities. Methodological reflections like the addition of pathologization into the entanglement of power dynamics in studying these evolving phenomena will also be explored. 

Bringing together perspectives from different disciplines and regions, this event invites us to rethink what postsecularity means today and how it challenges conventional understandings of power, identity, and resistance. 

Speakers:

Demet Gülçiçek is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK (Centre for the Study of Women and Gender), and an Assist. Prof. at Munzur University, Turkey. Her book titled Travelling Theory and Women's Movements in Turkey: Imagining Europe is published with Routledge. She is the co-editor in chief of Feminist Tahayyül Journal. Currently, she is researching on the invisible labour and affective relations in academic writing processes.

Kim Knibbe is Associate Professor Anthropology and Sociology of Religion. Her curiosity is guided by the question of how people navigate between what they consider to be 'given'  and what they believe to be human-made and therefore subject to change. Her recent research has used anthropological approaches to examine the intersections of sexuality, religion, and secularism. She has also published a series of theoretical and methodological reflections on studying religion ethnographically

Maki Kimura is Associate Professor (Teaching) in Gender and Politics at University College London. Her broad research interests are in the areas of gender and racial equality, and social justice. One of her research foci is on the rise of right-wing and militarism and how this draws on an intersections of gender, race, class, colonialism and religion.  The recent rise of far-right is often entangled with religious nationalism, as has been observed with the support that US President Donald Trump received from evangelicals. A similar connection, it is suggested, could be identified in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Orban’s Hungary, Modi’s India, Abe’s Japan, Duterte’s Philippines, and Erdogan’s Turkey, and also has increasingly become more visible in Western Europe. My talk aims to illuminate how this religious nationalism-far right complex not only creates societies where gender and sexual equalities are curtailed but also develops a global landscape where militarised/toxic masculinity prevails and fuels militarism and violence that reproduces colonial dominance and racism. 

Mia Liinason is Wallenberg Scholar and Professor of Gender Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Her research is located at the intersection of transnational feminism and queer, studies of religion and populism, and of emergent digital cultures. Currently, Mia leads the collaborative five-year research program Gender Struggles in the New Conjuncture, exploring the complex interplay between retrogressive mobilizations and emancipatory struggles in Europe and beyond. 

Michal Kravel-Tovi is an associate professor of socio-cultural anthropology at the department of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Her work lies at the intersection of political anthropology, anthropology of religion, and Jewish studies. 

Nella van den Brandt is a post-doctoral researcher in the Research Unit of Systematic Theology and the Study of Religions. She is currently part of a NWO-funded VIDI research project entitled "Unequal Partners?", for which she is developing an ethnographic research that asks how interfaith mixed romantic couples in Flanders negotiate their daily lives together.

Tanya Zion-Waldoks, a tenured assistant professor at the Seymour Fox School of Education at Hebrew University, specializes in the intersections of gender, education, religion, and politics. Her work focuses on feminist activism, gender equality in education, and anti-racist activism in Israel. She has published in leading journals such as Gender & Society and Signs. Her book, Holy Rebellion: Religious Feminism and the Transformation of Judaism and Women's Rights in Israel (Brandeis University Press, 2024), co-authored with Ronit Irshai, won the 74th National Jewish Book Award in Women's Studies. A former postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University's Center for Culture, Society and Religion, her current research on Haredi critical activism is funded by the Israel Science Foundation.

Sabine Grenz is Ass.-Prof. for Gender Studies in the Faculty of Philosophy and Education as well as the Faculty of Social Sciences since 2020. Additionally, Sabine Grenz is Assoc. Prof. (Priv.-Doz.) for Gender Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. From 2017-2020, she was Univ.-Prof. for Gender Studies at the University of Vienna. From 2015-17, she was Acting Prof. for Diversity Research at the University of Göttingen (2015-17).