Suchergebnisse

This article addresses the question of women's agency in traditionalist religion, through a study of self-narratives by women in the Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp, Belgium. Women who study or work outside the boundaries of their community were interviewed about their experiences in negotiating gender ideologies by moving in and between the `secular' and `religious' spaces of higher education, work and home. Various subject positions emerged in terms of either rejecting, separating or reconciling dominant community norms regarding women's proper role with personal trajectories of self-realization and individual autonomy. On the one hand, the results confirm the possibility of women's agency within religious-traditionalist settings and in that sense subscribe to some recent feminist theoretical challenges to secularism. However, it is argued that the younger generation faces more restrictions in negotiating religious and secular gender-role expectations in the Antwerp context. Their prospects depend on the dynamic between global fundamentalist tendencies and local liberal state policies of multicultural accommodation.

In this article the marginal position of the study of religion within gender studies as a purportedly interdisciplinary field of research is attained. Despite the increasing importance of knowledge about the relationship between religion and gender, this topic of study is often left up to feminist theologians, usually working autonomously within the discipline of theology. This research is often neglected within gender studies, which can foremost be ascribed to the 'awkward relationship' between feminism and religion in general. This exclusion is kept in place due to both the lack of interest for religious diversity and diversity in terms of the research relationship. It is suggested that a social science perspective may contribute substantially to a solution of the problem of the marginalisation of the study of religion within gender studies. It is argued that there must be more space for interdisciplinarity whereby both gender and religion are applied as multi-dimensional and contextualised categories of analysis.

This volume explores a variety of 'harmful cultural practices': a term increasingly employed by organizations working within a human rights framework to refer to certain discriminatory practices against women in the global South. Drawing on recent work by feminists across the social sciences, as well as activists from around the world, this volume discusses and presents research on practices such as veiling, forced marriage, honour related and dowry violence, female genital 'mutilation', lip plates and sex segregation in public space. With attention to the analytic utility of the notion of h.

Des themes tels que le foulard, les migrations par mariage, la repudiation, la polygamie, les mutilations genitales, les operations de reconstruction de l'hymen ou les crimes d'honneur ne manquent generalement pas d'alimenter de grands debats societaux. Ce livre entend apporter une contribution critique aux controverses societales actuelles en cernant les problemes que pose la conciliation des droits des femmes et du respect des traditions culturelles et religieuses. Il presente une selection d'articles d'actualite qui illustrent les paradoxes du debat sur le feminisme et le multiculturalisme

This article presents an analysis of the recent headscarf debate in Belgium, and explores in particular to what extent issues of gender equality and feminist arguments were central to the discussion. It is argued that compared to France, concerns about secularity and state-neutrality, national identity and equality, all find resonance in the Belgian context, but are articulated in a more ambiguous and less `principled' way. This partly explains the paradoxical situation in which, despite a widespread resistance to a general law banning the wearing of religious symbols in public schools, in practice, headscarf prohibitions are on the rise throughout various regions of the country. Although issues of gender equality and cultural diversity often cut and flow across debates and policies in European nation states, the Belgian hijab question provides a unique case, because of various lines of fracture and processes of increasing diversification that characterize Belgian society.

This book takes religion as an entry point for a deeper exploration into why practices of gender-based violence continue and what possible actions might help to contribute to their eradication. International donors are committed to reducing and ending gender-related harm, particularly violence against women, but clear answers as to why harmful practices persist are often slow to emerge. Theological research struggles to find strong links, yet religion is often referred to by local people as the reason for practices such as female cutting, male circumcision, early and forced marriage, nutritional taboos and birth practices, mandatory (un)veiling, harmful spiritual practices, polygamy, gender unequal marital and inheritance rights and so-called honour crimes. This book presents empirical cases of religious, non-religious and secular actors, including local and international governmental and non-governmental agencies in the fields of development, health and equality policies. Tracing their different understandings of how religion is entangled with gender-based violence both contextually as well as historically, the book sheds light on helpful and unhelpful as well as erroneous and harmful understandings of such practices in local and global perspectives. Centralising the perspectives of women themselves, this book will be an important read for development practitioners and policy makers, as well as for researchers across religious studies, gender studies, and global development.