Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference

Linell Cady, Tracy Fessenden

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231536042
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

Global struggles over women's roles, rights, and dress increasingly cast the secular and the religious in tense if not violent opposition. When advocates for equality speak in terms of rights and modern progress, or reactionaries ground their authority in religious and scriptural appeals, both tend to presume women's emancipation is ineluctably tied to secularization. Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference upsets this certainty by drawing on diverse voices and traditions in studies that historicize, question, and test the implicit links between secularism and expanded freedoms for women. Rather than position secularism as the answer to conflicts over gender and sexuality, this volume shows both religion and the secular collaborate in creating the conditions that generate them.

PART 1

GENDERING THE DIVIDE

1

GENDERING THE DIVIDE

RELIGION, THE SECULAR, AND THE POLITICS OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

LINELL E. CADY AND TRACY FESSENDEN

WHEREVER RELIGION is seen to shape or constrain the meanings of human flourishing in the twenty-first century, gender and sexuality occupy charged terrain. This is so across the globe and in forums as diverse as fashion, diplomacy, education, immigration policy, marriage law, military strategy, health care reform, and humanitarian aid. Increasingly, women and sexuality take center stage in invocations of the secular, which promises—or threatens—to liberate both from religion’s tenacious hold.

The conventional wisdom that secularization, sexual freedom, and women’s emancipation run always on parallel tracks belongs to no one party, region, religion, or sect. As we write in May 2012, for example, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has just dismissed an adviser to the royal cabinet, Sheikh Abdul-Mohsen al-Obeikan, who had been critical of measures meant to ease gender segregation and advance the status of women. Under King Abdullah’s extremely gradual and cautious reforms, Saudi Arabia has promised women the right to vote, opened its first co-ed university, and strengthened legal redress for victims of domestic violence. The sacking of Obeikan came shortly after he publicly accused advocates of gender desegregation in Saudi courts of wanting to “westernise society” and to “replace justice based on (Islamic) sharia law with secular laws.”¹ That the reforms were introduced under the monarch of an ultraconservative Islamic state, that they are supported by observant Saudi Muslims, that the values of dignity and equality before the law have deep religious as well as nonreligious sources: none of this mattered for the framing of these inroads toward gender equality in Saudi Arabia as signs of encroaching secularization.

In the United States, meanwhile, the provision for contraceptive coverage in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), signed into law by President Obama in 2010, has unleashed a storm of protest. Opponents of the provision, led predominantly by conservative Catholics and their allies, contend that the requirement to offer insurance that includes contraceptive coverage to benefits-eligible employees, under the broader heading of preventive medical care, unjustly compels some employers to “abandon” their “religious principles.”² That message has traction even in the face of concerted support for health care reform from religious organizations and actors who invoke scriptural injunctions to care for the sick and vulnerable.³ The view that the PPACA’s contraceptive provision represents a “war on religion” was vigorously endorsed by GOP nominee Mitt Romney during the recent presidential election, who described it as evidence that the Obama administration was set on establishing “secularism” as an official religion.⁴

The assumption that advances for gender and sexual equality inevitably accrue to the power of the secular, to the detriment of religion, is by no means confined to conservative opponents of such advances or to those who remain blind to religious support for them. Consider Isabel Coleman’s recent work on Muslim women’s movements across the Middle East. Coleman justly praises these women’s efforts to surmount the difficulties facing secular movements for women’s freedoms. Where the latter’s perceived associations with colonial and neocolonial projects, authoritarian states, and urban elites have limited their appeal, Muslim women’s groups’ “promotion of women’s rights through Islamic discourse” allows them to press claims for equality without compromising their religious identity or commitments.⁵ Extolling the populist appeal and socially transformative potential of these movements, Coleman introduces their leading figures and organizations across much of the Middle East in a series of stirring profiles. All the more astonishing, then, to arrive at a concluding chapter subtitled—with no trace of irony—“Unveiling the Future.” There Coleman predicts that the women’s movements whose successes she details will mark “the beginning of what will undoubtedly be a long process of change—in many cases intergenerational change. The process will be uneven, and the outcomes from place to place will no doubt differ. I suspect that over the long term, Islamic feminism, like other reform movements that preceded it, will end up unapologetically secular. Only then will never-ending debates over religious interpretation be removed from politics.”⁶ Without hesitation or strain, Coleman smoothly integrates what her book has so far compellingly presented as counterevidence—that religious movements succeed where secular movements have failed in the project of advancing women’s rights—into the broader emancipatory narrative of secularization. Standing squarely within the interpretive horizon of modern secular progress, Coleman concludes that “Islamic feminism is an important emotional and intellectual stepping-stone—and tactic—to reconcile religion to the demands of the modern world.”⁷ However nuanced their interventions or vibrant their successes, Muslim feminists, in Coleman’s examples, are powerless to overturn the logic of the secularizing process, which is apparently impervious to disconfirmation. The secularization narrative, in turn, threads the narrative of gender and sexual emancipation into its own triumphal plotline, such that, here, robust expressions of Islamic feminism betoken the victory of secular forces, whatever the evidence to the contrary.

That a story about Muslim religious activism for women’s freedoms can so easily be made into a story about the invincible march of secularization shows what anthropologist Webb Keane calls the “moral narrative of modernity” in action. “The moral narrative of modernity,” writes Keane, “is a story about human emancipation and self-mastery. According to this moral narrative, modernity is a story of human liberation from a host of false beliefs and fetishisms that undermined freedom in the past.” This is the path along which both women and individual conscience are freed from the illegitimate authority of religious constraint. To this view, those who persist in the observance of religious law, “displacing their own agency,” as Keane puts it, onto “rules, traditions, or fetishes (including sacred texts),” are a puzzle and a problem, perhaps even a threat to freedom as such. They “are not merely behind the times; by denying the agency that is properly theirs, they can even undermine the gains made by others over the course of that long struggle.”⁸ For feminists, particularly, to question the moral narrative of modernity, with its tacit assumption that secularity must and will prevail, is to risk giving up on progress altogether.

Feminist historian Joan Scott urges us to open the question of secularization anyway. In her anchoring contribution to this volume, Scott argues that secularization is not inherently liberating for women and, indeed, is historically grounded in their exclusion from politics. Scott reminds us that women were absent from the “originary moments of secularism (in its democratic or republic forms)” in the making of modern nation-states, whose founders did not consider women political equals. The early French revolutionaries who “banished women from political meetings and active citizenship,” she points out, did so by drawing upon arguments from nature, not religion: the difference of sex alone was legitimate and sufficient ground for inequality. French women did not receive the right to vote until 1944. American women were enfranchised only in 1920, long after the ratification of the religion clauses of the First Amendment that separated church and state.

Why then is it that advances in women’s rights are so easily seen as the inevitable fruit of the secularizing process? Put another way, why do women come so late to a narrative of emancipation that is presumed to have already included them? Following Talal Asad, Scott identifies the ready equation of secularization with gender and sexual equality as an especially resilient “myth of liberalism,” a redescription of “the political exclusion of women, the propertyless, [and] colonial subjects in liberalism’s history” as the gradual but inevitable extension of “liberalism’s incomplete project of universal emancipation.”⁹ In this sense, she suggests, the narrative of secularization that gathers women and sexuality into its liberating trajectory is a recent offshoot, belonging to the same historical and political contexts that give rise to a hyperbolic discourse of a “clash of civilizations.”

In a particularly influential framing of that discourse, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris propose that the true conflict is in fact a “sexual clash of civilizations.” ¹⁰ In this model the secular West, as champion and guardian of gender equality, must contend with the rest, most especially the Muslim world, whose deeply patriarchal cultures do violence to women’s flourishing—a narrative invoked across a wide political spectrum in support of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.¹¹ Noting that the burgeoning scholarly literature on secularism, meanwhile, gives little sustained attention to discourses of gender and sexual emancipation, and to constructions of women’s rights in particular, Scott calls for a new genealogy of secularism that illuminates the politics of gender—a politics, she argues, that has been effaced and misappropriated for a variety of projects.

Contributors to this volume take up Scott’s call by reading secularism through the prism of gender and sexuality in a variety of contexts. In essays that range across regions, traditions, and temporal frames, scholars of religion, history, sociology, anthropology, politics, and literature explore the historical and conceptual articulations between discourses of the secular and secularizing processes, on the one hand, and variously formulated projects of gender and sexual emancipation, on the other. Many of the essays focus on particular countries, including Egypt, France, Bosnia-Herzegovina, India, and the United States, though in each case the analytic limits of national borders become apparent as the aspirations and anxieties of nations play out on a broader stage. Without dismissing the salience of national contexts, other essays focus primarily on discourses and institutions that are transnational in scope, such as the Roman Catholic Church, veiling, or international law. Contributors hew to no party line. Secularizing movements are seen both to advance and to constrain possibilities for gender and sexual equality. Taken together, however, the essays and cases call into question a rigid secularism that positions itself as the solution to conflicts over gender and sexuality, rather than a structural feature of the conditions that generate them.

To question the secularization narrative at all, of course, can feel like a precipitously risky move at a moment in the United States when conservative religious leaders and their political allies appear to be working in lockstep to scale back advances in gender and sexual equality.¹² Examples are dispiritingly easy to list: the Vatican has targeted the largest body of U.S. nuns for censure and disciplinary oversight on the grounds of their alleged “silence” on abortion and same-sex marriage. Laws spearheaded by religious groups and passed in state after state prohibit gay marriages and invalidate existing ones, in some cases eliminating recognition of civil unions. States have enacted laws that limit women’s access to reproductive health-care services, emboldened by the recent campaign orchestrated by the all-male Catholic hierarchy. In view of entrenched or resurgent patriarchal religious power in the U.S. and globally, any call for a rethinking of secularism as a force for sexual equality and women’s freedoms might seem like a naive proposal for unilateral disarmament in the face of mounting and increasingly militant opposition.¹³ The examples gathered here nevertheless suggest that insisting on a strict separation between religious and secular domains, and counting on that separation itself to do the work, may in the end do more harm than good to the cause of sexual equality and women’s flourishing.

Why call for a rethinking of the religious/secular divide now, when gains for gender and sexual equality have come so heavily under siege? In part because the political exigencies of the moment work so strongly against seeing the limits and vulnerabilities of that divide, leaving us with distorted views and unpalatable options. In light of what the essays here bring into focus as the far messier ways that religious and secular identities are lived, co-constructed, and traversed, too strict an insistence on their separation might press us to stand for women and against religion, even at the expense of women who identify with forms of flourishing and belonging for which secularism does not allow or account, or, perhaps, to side with religion (or “religious freedom”) over against those whom the religious control of gender and sexuality subject to real and growing harms. When framed as polar opposites and antagonists in struggles over gender and sexuality, moreover, religious and secular actors can often be seen to reinforce and empower one another, supercharging the subject of debate and redoubling the determination of each side to prevail. In the United States, for example, the legal separation of religious and secular domains is precisely what grounds the claims of religious actors to special, opt-out status vis-à-vis legal protections for gender and sexual equality, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Part 1. Gendering the Divide
• Part 2. Gender and the Privatization of Religion
• Part 3. Gender, Sexuality, and the Body Politic
• Part 4. Bridging the Divide
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index