A reflection on the conference ‘Religious Transformation and Gender Contestations in/and the Study of Religion, Gender and Sexuality’, 10-12 March, 2021, Utrecht University

Rahil Roodsaz

Attending the final conference of the NWO research project ‘Beyond “Religion versus Emancipation” was a true pleasure both as a unique get-together opportunity during the Covid-19 pandemic and the numerous inspiring talks and discussions by a group of people invested in troubling essentialized hierarchical relations between categories related to religion, gender and sexuality.

I especially enjoyed the contributions in which the troubling of hierarchical relations went hand-in-hand with seeking unexpected links and parallels between categories that are not usually associated with one another or are even seen as each other’s opposite. This way, not only the inherent stability of each category could be questioned, but also the (hierarchical) relations between them would be disrupted or at least become less fixed.

The keynote by prof. dr. Esra Özyürek was an example of such an approach. Relating to the question of whether Islamophobia is a form of racism or not, Özyürek complicated the underlying simplistic assumptions about racial and religious belonging as either innate or acquired. Based on experiences of converts to Islam in Germany, Özyürek made a link to ideas about authenticity as a ground for acceptance and inclusion of homosexuality and argued that in both cases, our discussions about whether or not one can walk away from sexual or religious identity will benefit from more complicated understandings of agency and choice that better corresponds with people’s lived realities.

In a similar vein, in a panel organized by dr. Jelle Wiering on ‘sexual enchantment’, the presenters critically and carefully investigated the potential of this conceptual framework to disrupt the secular/religious dichotomy and its underlying assumptions about sexuality as transparent, healthy, speakable, and teachable, on the one hand, and sexuality as unfathomable, secret, extra-ordinary, and embodied on the other.

In the panel ‘Transformative Perspectives on Gendered Bodies and Intimacies’, where I had the chance to present my own work on polygyny and polyamory, we continued the discussion about the analytical value of dialogical encounters between assumedly progressive and oppressive practices. For instance, Dr. Anna Piela thought-provokingly engaged with the transformation in the reception of niqab-wearing in Europe and North America since mask-wearing became common due to the current pandemic. In the same panel and based on a qualitative research project among Catholic women in Flanders, doctoral researcher Eline Huygens convincingly argued for a reconceptualization of romantic love and religiosity in which, rather than mutual exclusion, the entanglement of these categories would be foregrounded.

What I see as a common thread in these endeavors is a strategy that wants to attend to the fluidity of categories and thereby destabilize their underlying hierarchies by making ‘unexpected’ links. However, as became explicit in many of the discussions during the conference, this approach runs the risk of blurring the particularities of individual categories that are both ‘real’ in everyday life and relevant for political and legal work. Seeking a balance between recognizing those particularities and continue investing in unusual alliances and common concerns will remain a topic for further reflection in hopefully more of these inspiring get-togethers, although preferably under different, offline circumstances.