Nella Van den Brandt

KU Leuven | ku leuven

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...

Women often embody the central values and practices of their religious tradition. When they leave their community, women find a part of the “religious tapestry” remaining with them long after their disengagement. In this article, we draw from research in the UK and Finland to explore women’s efforts to unlearn parts of their former religious belong...

Chapter 4 explores a novel of Franca Treur, Now Hear My Voice (2017), in tandem with a novel by Josha Zwaan, Parnassia (2010). It looks at the way the two novels represent women leaving Calvinist and Jewish faiths and communities in the south-western Dutch province Zeeland. It analyses these stories of leaving religion comparatively to look for ins...

Chapter 7 takes a number of public and cultural expressions as occasions to critically think through Jewish-Muslim relations in Europe. The case studies include the 2020 and 2021 contributions by Arnold Grunberg and Abdelkader Benali to the national Second World War commemorations in the Netherlands; a 2020 theatre play by Soufiane Moussouli about...

The second chapter highlights stories of women’s conversion in contemporary Western European contexts. Theorising the connections between religion, storytelling, identity, subject-formation, and conversion, the chapter conceptualises conversion stories as enabling individual subjects to negotiate a terrain of difference and transformation, includin...

In the conclusion I take up the issue of cultural work once again to rethink the chapters’ analyses as to how they provide an alternative and critical contribution to academic and public accounts of the lives of women and men of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, and their underlying concepts of religion/secularity, gender and race. Addition...

Chapter 1 provides an autoethnographic account with a two-fold aim. First, it illustrates the emergence and the concrete backgrounds of my understanding of religious transformation as inherently tied to lived experiences of gender, sexuality, class, race and postcolonial positionality. Second, it is meant to personally position myself vis-à-vis the...

The third chapter analyses contemporary cultural representations of orthodox Calvinist and orthodox Jewish gendered subjectivities in the Netherlands and the UK. It explores how a novel by Franca Treur, Confetti Harvest (2009), and one by Naomi Alderman, Disobedience (2006), and their movie adaptations, represent the negotiations and becomings of w...

The fifth chapter contributes an analysis of recent films made by Eché Janga and Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese. It explores how the movies shed a critical light on the religious transformation by girls and women in postcolonial and/or post-slavery contexts. First, it investigates Janga’s film ‘Buladó’ (2020) regarding the envisioning of the links and re...

The sixth chapter focuses on Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission and its 2017 theatre adaptation. The chapter focuses upon the way in which the novel and theatre play construct understandings of the Islamic State and Muslims, secular modernity, and femininity and masculinity. First, it looks at how the novel responds to, and is part and parc...

In this article, we explore the framing of religious converts by Dutch and Flemish newspapers in the period 1991–2017. We focus on the differences and commonalities in ways of talking about religious conversions to Christianity and Islam. Our approach is to probe the ‘figure’ of the convert: How is the religious convert framed and understood? We pr...

This article draws upon and contributes to current discussions in the study of conversion, Muslims in Europe, and gender and emotion by taking media productions as an ethnographic starting point for analyzing the subject position of women who converted to Islam. In contemporary Western European contexts, the phenomenon of conversion to Islam evokes...

In this chapter, I reflect on the state of the art in the study of religion and gender in Europe. First, I look at theoretical and conceptual developments in the study of religion and gender by means of a dialogue with a recent overview of the field by Linda Woodhead (2016). I connect this reflection to a review of the current politico-social situa...

This article analyses the production of gendered subjectivities in contemporary cultural representations of women and girls belonging to conservative protestant communities in Northern and Western Eu-rope. We take the recent work of the Finnish and Dutch female novelists Pauliina Rauhala and Franca Treur as our case study. We explore how their nove...

This article is a thematic exploration of the organizations that Muslim women have established in the Netherlands and Belgium since the 1970s, and the forms of activism they have engaged in. The article provides insight into the complex dynamic between the lived experience of Muslim women in Dutch and Flemish societies, the shifting forms of their...

This chapter highlights stories of women’s conversion in contemporary Western European contexts. Theorising the connections between religion, storytelling, identity, subject-formation and conversion, the chapter conceptualises conversion stories as enabling individual subjects to negotiate a terrain of difference and transformation, including multi...

In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ This line of enquiry is not limited to academic literature. In recent years, converts to Islam have faced intense scrutiny in mainstream media across Europe...

Vrouwelijke bekeerlingen tot de islam komen veelvuldig in de Nederlandse media aan bod. In dit artikel worden drie belangrijke invalshoeken besproken die hierin herhaaldelijk terugkeren: ten eerste de vraag waarom je jouw vrij-heid zou opgeven voor religie; ten tweede de focus op de moeder-dochterrela-tie; en ten derde radicalisering. Door de beeld...

This article contributes to the study of media, religion and culture from the perspective of gender and sexuality. It argues that media and culture need to be considered as locations in which 'other stories' about religion, gender and sexuality are potentially being produced. It shows that various types of media and visual artefacts have different...

In this article, I draw on critical investigations of gendered, racialised and sexualised discourses on Islam and Muslim minorities in Western Europe to explore two recent instances of Muslim female intellectuals and artists responding to what has been dubbed “the Muslim question”. I shall show that Muslim women’s counter-voices are multilayered, c...

In this article, I engage with feminist discussions about secularity, gender, and emancipation. The feminist study of the secular was spurred by interventions of Saba Mahmood [2005. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press], and can be seen as a critical engagement with at least one...

In this article, I aim to contribute to discussions about the intersections between religion/secularity, gender, and race by drawing upon an analysis of contemporary cultural production in Western Europe: Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission (Submission) and the 2017 theatre play Onderworpen (Submission). The analysis focuses upon the way in...

In de zomer van 2018 draaide de film Disobedience van regisseur Sebastián Lelio in de filmhuizen. Het is een bewerking van de 2006 bekroonde debuutroman van de Brits-joodse auteur Naomi Alderman. Disobedience gaat over Ronit en Esti, jeugdvriendinnen en geliefden uit een Londense joods-orthodoxe wijk. De film en roman ontwikkelen andere verhaallijn...

Hebben de aandacht voor bekering naar de Islam in hedendaagse media en de populariteit van verhalen van en over ex-orthodoxe protestanten in hedendaagse literatuur iets met elkaar te maken? Ik vermoed van wel, en zal dat vermoeden aan de hand van verschillende observaties uiteenzetten. Daarna ga ik dieper in op verhalen van vrouwen die orthodox pro...

This book provides interdisciplinary, global, and multi-religious perspectives on the relationship between women's identities, religion, and social change in the contemporary world. The book discusses the experiences and positions of women, and particular groups of women, to understand patterns of religiosity and religious change. It also addresses...

This chapter considers the case of Flanders. In Flanders, Christian women's movements belonging to Catholic civil society used to draw a large following and were able to contribute to the political, religious, and social emancipation of Catholic women throughout Belgium. Today, however, these Christian women's movements face declining membership an...

This written version of various conversations came into being as a response to Dutch entertainer Claudia de Breij’s 2016 New Year’s Eve cabaret performance. We were enticed to write something about this performance because of the numerous ambiguities that were present in it. What was striking was the fact that we, a group of Dutch and Belgian acade...

Download the full special issue here: https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/13883186/21/1

This contribution is an interview with social and cultural anthropologist of Surinamese-Dutch background Professor Emeritus Gloria Wekker. It discusses the debate that ensued in the Netherlands after the publication of her book White Innocence (2016), now translated in Dutch as Witte onschuld (2017). The interview covers the reception of the book,...

In this article, I set out to explore various intersectional social constructions of ethnicity, religion and sexuality. First, I conduct an analysis of recent public controversies in Flanders (Belgium) about women’s and (homo)sexual equality as set against religious authorities and religious-ethnic minorities. It reveals how dominant understandings...

In this review essay, I discuss interdisciplinary and comparative research that is taking place in the fields of religious, gender and sexuality studies. I make a case for the academic and political relevance of research projects that are interdisciplinary - and that, therefore, generate multi-layered knowledge by starting from various points of vi...

In this article, we aim to contribute to feminist academic debates about multiculturalism and secularism/religion by drawing upon an analysis of an ethnic minority women’s organisation in Belgium that has been active since 1999: ella. The analysis focuses upon the way in which ella constructs notions of empowerment and emancipation by discussing st...

Contemporary political-public concerns with connections between Islam and terrorist violence in West-European societies contribute to ‘the Muslim question’, that is, the construction of Muslims, Islam and Muslimness as essentially ‘different’ from Western culture and society. This chapter focuses on 2014–2015 instances of Flemish public renderings...

To be downloaded at: http://www.lambdanordica.se/artikelarkiv_sokresultat.php?lang=sv&fields[]=art_id&arkivsok=574#resultat

In west European countries, public debates on migration, integration, and diversity are informed by particular understandings of secularism and the secular society. In our increasingly diverse societies, so the story goes, it is needed to implement a certain type of secularism and/or support particular types of secular standpoints in order to maint...

Keywords: feminisme, Vlaanderen, verbeelding, post-feminisme, beschavingsstrijd, reddingsverhalen

De Vlaamse politieke en publieke debatten over de hoofddoek, islam en emancipatie zijn veelal opgezet in termen van conflicterende culturen. In dit artikel bespreek ik de kloof die bestaat tussen representaties van moslimvrouwen, zoals deze circuleren in de Vlaamse debatten en het reële levenstraject van een individuele moslimvrouw. Hiertoe bied ik...