Luke M. Herrington
Despite enormous geographical, historical, and denominational differences, research on religion has convincingly and consistently demonstrated that women’s religious experiences are quite different from those experienced by men (e.g., Dionne, Jr., et al. 2014; Fahmy 2018; Hacket 2016; Marshall 2010). Likewise, research on the gendered dimensions of political violence demonstrates that women and other sexual minorities are uniquely vulnerable during spasms of international conflict and civil war (e.g., Hynes 2004). Given these two facts, it should be wholly without controversy to suggest that men and women may have distinct experiences when it comes to such phenomena as religious violence, religious persecution, or religious oppression. Yet, situated as they are on their relatively isolated islands of theory, some feminist researchers and scholars of international religious freedom do little more than talk past each other where the nexus of religion, gender, and political violence is concerned. This is problematic for multiple reasons, chief of which may be that an inability to dialogue prevents the field from achieving a more general understanding of religious persecution on the one hand, and gender-based or sexualized violence on the other. More specifically, their inability to dialogue results in theoretical, conceptual, and statistical ambiguity, as it obscures important differences that likely exist between gendered violence targeted against religious minorities and religiously motivated violence targeted at women and people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ).
In the next section of this article, I trace this lack of theoretical engagement to ideological debates rooted in American partisan political discourse. I suggest that debates about sexual freedom and religious freedom in the United States (U.S.) have polarized academic discussions on these subjects in a way that undermines the study of International Relations, ultimately causing both Western feminist and religious freedom theorists to overlook important nuances and sights of potential synthesis and even collaboration. I subsequently turn to the nexus of religion, gender, and political violence, and demonstrate how the theoretical discontinuity between Western feminists and scholars of religious freedom undermines conceptual clarity in discussions of sacralized and sexualized violence. Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2006) assertions about the gendered dimensions of religious persecution provide a useful starting point from which to probe this problem. Finally, I recommend adopting a more inclusive, intersectional approach to religion, gender, and political violence.
Advocacy for religious freedom and advocacy for women’s rights and sexual freedom have been on a collision course for some time (Boden 2007). Yet, it seems that feminist researchers and scholars of religious freedom only tacitly engage each other, if at all, and they never really do so directly. It seems plausible that this is because they have competing ideas about the spread of sexual and religious freedom abroad rooted in competing ideological visions of American politics.
By way of illustration, feminists like Susan Moller Okin (1998) observe that religious freedom is used as a pretext to justify the violation of women in private homes in a way that mirrors the American left’s critiques of religion. That is, women’s rights must be explicitly recognized as a core element of one’s human rights because of the way religious fundamentalism rejects women’s equality. As Okin sees it, the problem is that human rights—as laid out in the Lockean tradition—were conceived of as the rights of heads of household, and thus, the rights of men. As such, fundamentalists’ arguments for religious freedom intentionally imply a rejection of women’s rights (Okin 1998).
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