Catholic Women as Subjects of Debate: Thinking through a Gendered Religio-Racialised Location in Flanders

Eline Huygens, Nella van den Brandt

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)
3 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Through the analysis of empirical material that discusses women’s positions in religion in Flanders/Belgium, this article shows how local religion/secular dynamics are co-constituted by issues of race and gender. Starting from the premise that religious women’s (self-)positioning must be understood from a critical perspective on both secularity and race, we show how a.) mainstream secular and racialising discourses aim to discipline various religious subjects by using questions of gender justice, and b.) ethnically mainstream young Catholic women partially resist this by distinguishing themselves from religio-racialised others and producing whiteness. Based on our analysis, we argue for taking women’s self-positioning towards religious others seriously as shaping a gendered religio-racialised location. Thinking through the production of a gendered religio-racialised location reveals how white Christian normativity depends on performativity and is a gendered construct. As such, we demonstrate the need for further investigations of the co-constructions of race, religion and gender focusing on the perspectives and positions of those normally excluded from these critical discussions, namely ethnic majority Christians in Europe.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)(In-Press)
Number of pages23
JournalReligion and Gender
Volume(In-Press)
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 23 May 2024

Bibliographical note

© 2024 Eline Huygens and Nella van den Brandt.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited..

Keywords

  • Religion/secularity
  • gender
  • religio-racialised difference –
  • Christian normativity
  • Belgium

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Catholic Women as Subjects of Debate: Thinking through a Gendered Religio-Racialised Location in Flanders'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this