The Muslim woman figures as one of the central anchor points of the “Muslim question.” Integrated into a discourse of emancipation, her body has become the battleground for a new discourse of…
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Crossing and conversion
Conversion marriages: Rethinking categories of religion in colonial India’s courtrooms
May 22, 2018
Conversion marriages, which always involved litigants who had exchanged their religious self-designations, perpetually mixed up personal law codes and created spaces of legal inclarity. This is why the courts struggled (and continue…
May 22, 2018
Sex, secularism, and “femonationalism”
Volatile signs: Feminism, secularism, political economy
May 18, 2018
What, then, does a feminist critique of secularism and its imperial geopolitics look like? What are the terms in which it proceeds? These are a just a few of the orchestrating questions…
May 18, 2018
Sex, secularism, and “femonationalism”
by
Joan Scott
On Sex and Secularism

Overall, the book aims to do two things: First, to offer a history that documents the ways in which gender inequality was built into the discourse of secularism; and second, to theorize the relationship between gender—the mutable attempt to establish a grid of intelligibility for the difference of sex—and politics—the institutionalization of power and its justifications. Gender and politics are inextricably interconnected, I argue, each looking to the other for its legitimation. I think the original contribution of the book is its theory about gender and politics. It develops and deepens arguments I have been making for a while about the ways in which psychoanalytic theory about the difference of sex enables us to historicize the question of gender. (Ironically, the charge against psychoanalysis by many historians is that it is unusable because it is ahistorical.)
May 18, 2018
Sex, secularism, and “femonationalism”
by
Sara Farris
On In the Name of Women’s Rights

Femonationalism is the term I introduce to describe both how nationalist right-wing parties exploit feminist ideas within Islamophobic campaigns, and the ways some feminists and femocrats endorse anti-Islam agendas in the name of women’s rights. I analyze how and why parties such as the Northern League in Italy, the National Front in France, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands have shown “concern” for Muslim women, describing them as “victims to be rescued,” while stigmatizing Muslim and other non-Western male immigrants as women’s worst enemies. {. . .} I wrote this book mostly because I wanted to introduce a political-economic perspective into the scholarly and activists’ debates on the new faces of Islamophobia. What I note in the book, more specifically, is that we should pay attention to the gendered double standard the mainstream media apply to migrant men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. We need to decipher its economic rationality alongside its “culturalist” expressions.
May 18, 2018
Crossing and conversion
Reclamation in The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries
May 14, 2018
The Fellowship of Affirming Ministries (TFAM) occupies a distinct position in the religious lives of its mostly LGBT and African American members. TFAM is a coalition of about forty congregations around the…
May 14, 2018
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