Transforming Bodies and Religions: Powers and Agencies in Europe 0367407280, 9780367407285

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Transforming Bodies and Religions

This book sheds an interdisciplinary light on ‘transforming bodies’: bodies that have been subjected to, contributed to, or have resisted social transformations within religious or secular contexts in contemporary Europe. It explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and religion that underpin embodied transformations. Using post-­secularist, postcolonial, and gender/queer perspectives, it aims to gain a better understanding of the orchestrations and effects of larger social transitions related to religion. This volume is the outcome of the intensive collaboration of the authors, who for years have been meeting regularly in Utrecht, the Netherlands, to discuss themes related to religion and ‘the challenge of difference’, with an added afterword by Prof. Pamela Klassen from the University of Toronto. The book is divided into three subsections that focus on particular types of embodiment: body politics in governmental and NGO organisations; the role of the body in literary and/or autobiographical narratives; and ethnographic case studies of bodies in daily life. Doing so, it provides an innovative exploration of contemporary religion and the body. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Theology, and Philosophy. Mariecke van den Berg studied Theology (BA) and Gender Studies (RMA) at Utrecht University. She obtained her PhD in Public Administration in 2014 at the University of Twente. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University in the project Beyond ‘Religion versus Emancipation’: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Conversion to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Contemporary Western Europe, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). She is assistant managing editor at the open-­access journal Religion and Gender. Lieke L. Schrijvers is a PhD candidate for a joint doctorate at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University and the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender at Ghent University. Her current research

is a comparative ethnographic study of religion, gender, and sexuality among female converts in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in the Netherlands. With this project, she is part of the NWO-­funded project Beyond ‘Religion versus Emancipation’: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Conversion to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Contemporary Western Europe. Jelle O. Wiering is a cultural anthropologist whose main interest lies in the field of religious studies. He is a lecturer in religious studies and sociology at the University of Groningen and Utrecht University. He recently finished his PhD at the University of Groningen. This project focused on the intersections of religion, secularity, and sexuality in the Netherlands. Previously, he researched Western Buddhists, and Dutch pilgrims traveling to Santiago de Compostela. Anne-­Marie Korte is a professor in religious studies at Utrecht University. She holds the chair of Religion and Gender, which aims to explore categories of gender, sexuality, and diversity when investigating the significance and operations of religion(s) in cultural processes and current social developments. She is currently Project Leader of the project Beyond ‘Religion versus Emancipation’: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Conversion to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Contemporary Western Europe, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and was the founding director of the journal Religion and Gender. Korte’s current research is directed at the role of gender and sexuality in contemporary accusations of blasphemy and on contemporary miracle stories.

Routledge Critical Studies in Religion, Gender and Sexuality Series Editors: Ulrike E. Auga, Adriaan van Klinken, Anne-­Marie Korte and Jeanette S. Jouili

This book series is dedicated to the critical study of religion, gender and sexuality, in conversation and exchange with the broader qualitative social sciences and humanities. It publishes cutting-­edge innovative research from both established scholars and up-­and-­coming researchers. Fundamentally concerned with “religion” as a field of imagination and power, the series explores the complex and dynamic relationship between religious knowledge, symbols and practices with categories of gender and sexuality in global contexts. An Epistemology of Religion and Gender Biopolitics, Performativity and Agency Ulrike E. Auga Transforming Bodies and Religions Powers and Agencies in Europe Edited by Mariecke van den Berg, Lieke L. Schrijvers, Jelle O. Wiering and Anne-­Marie Korte

For more information and a full list of titles in the series, please visit: www. routledge.com/religion/series/RCSRGS

Transforming Bodies and Religions Powers and Agencies in Europe

Edited by Mariecke van den Berg, Lieke L. Schrijvers, Jelle O. Wiering, and Anne-­Marie Korte

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Mariecke van den Berg, Lieke L. Schrijvers, Jelle O. Wiering, and Anne-Marie Korte; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Mariecke van den Berg, Lieke L. Schrijvers, Jelle O. Wiering, and Anne-Marie Korte to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-40728-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-80875-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of contributorsix Acknowledgementsxii

Transforming bodies and religions: powers and agencies in Europe

1

MARIECKE VAN DEN BERG, LIEKE L. SCHRIJVERS, AND JELLE O. WIERING

Introduction to governing bodies19 JELLE O. WIERING, AN VAN RAEMDONCK, AND ANNE-MARIE KORTE

  1 The secular body in the Dutch field of sexual health

23

JELLE O. WIERING

  2 SRHR, the liberated body, and the primacy of conscience: probing beyond the secular/religious binary

43

AN VAN RAEMDONCK

  3 The religious embodiments of Drag Sethlas: blasphemous popular art and the religious/secular divide before the Spanish court ANNE-­M ARIE KORTE

59

viii  Contents

Introduction to narrating bodies77 NELLA VAN DEN BRANDT, MARIECKE VAN DEN BERG, MEGAN MILOTA, NAWAL MUSTAFA, AND MATTHEA WESTERDUIN

  4 Negotiating transformation and difference: women’s stories of conversion to Judaism and Islam

81

NELLA VAN DEN BRANDT

  5 Embodying transformation: religious and gender transitions in Jewish autobiography

102

MARIECKE VAN DEN BERG

  6 “The Richest Material for Moral Reflection”: narrated bodies and narrative ethics

122

MEGAN MILOTA

  7 Exploring new vocabularies in conversations about religion, race, politics, and justice

135

NAWAL MUSTAFA AND MATTHEA WESTERDUIN

Introduction to negotiating bodies155 MARIA VLIEK, RAHIL ROODSAZ, AND LIEKE L. SCHRIJVERS

  8 (Re)Negotiating embodiment when moving out of Islam: an empirical inquiry into ‘A Secular Body’

159

MARIA VLIEK

  9 Vacillating in and out of whiteness: non-­religiosity and racial (dis)identification among the Iranian-­Dutch

178

RAHIL ROODSAZ

10 Women wearing the tallit: tracing gender, belonging, and conversion of new Jewish women

199

LIEKE L. SCHRIJVERS



Afterword: corporate, corporal, collective: reflections on bodies, genres, and the ongoing troubling of the categories of religion and the secular

221

PAMELA E. KLASSEN

Index228

Contributors

Mariecke van den Berg studied Theology (BA) and Gender Studies (RMA) at Utrecht University. She obtained her PhD in Public Administration in 2014 at the University of Twente. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University in the project Beyond ‘Religion versus Emancipation’: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Conversion to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Contemporary Western Europe, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). She is assistant managing editor at the open-­access journal Religion and Gender. Nella van den Brandt finished in 2014 her doctoral thesis at Ghent University, Belgium. She works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has published in international journals such as Culture and Religion, Social Compass, and Social Movement Studies. Her current research focuses on religion/secularity, gender, media and culture, and conversion. She is managing editor of the journal Religion and Gender. Pamela Klassen is a professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her books on religion and the body include The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018); Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (University of California Press, 2011); and Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America (Princeton University Press, 2001). She currently holds the Anneliese Maier Research Award from Germany’s Humboldt Foundation, for a five-­year project, Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies. Anne-­Marie Korte is a professor in religious studies at Utrecht University. She holds the chair of Religion and Gender, which aims to explore categories of gender, sexuality, and diversity when investigating the significance and operations of religion(s) in cultural processes and current social developments. She is currently project leader of the project Beyond

x  Contributors ‘Religion versus Emancipation’: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Conversion to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Contemporary Western Europe, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and was the founding director of the journal Religion and Gender. Korte’s current research is directed at the role of gender and sexuality in contemporary accusations of blasphemy and on contemporary miracle stories. Megan Milota is an assistant professor in Medical Humanities at the University Medical Center Utrecht. Megan holds a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Antwerp; her dissertation on the negotiation of belief in contemporary American fiction investigated how authors’ diverse storytelling methods impact reader assessment, and included a qualitative study of book clubs in the United States as well as a quantitative analysis of online review forums. She has published essays on a variety of topics, including the depiction of medical practitioners in 19th-­ century British fiction, secularity in the Lowlands, religious themes in novels by Louise Erdrich, Allegra Goodman, and Marilynne Robinson, and narrative medicine in the medical school classroom. Nawal Mustafa is currently a PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her PhD research focuses on the historical regulation of interracialised intimacy in the UK in the period of 1950–1970. She is interested in questions related to race, law, religion, and activism. Previously, Nawal worked for Amnesty International, Humanity in Action, and Critical Mass. Nawal is active as a board member for Bureau Clara Wichman and De Goede Zaak. Although the world is currently characterised by an immense inequality, Nawal hopes that her efforts, as small as they may be, can contribute to the redistribution of power and help create a more just world. An van Raemdonck received her doctorate in Comparative Science of Cultures from Ghent University, Belgium, with the support of an FWO Research Foundation Flanders scholarship. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her research interests include religion, secularism, gender, and sexuality, particularly its intersections with global processes, development, migration, and refugee contexts. She has published in Culture, Health and Sexuality, Social Inclusion, and Religions. Rahil Roodsaz is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Her fields of interest include sexuality, migration, diversity, subjectivity, intimacy, and (late-­)modernity. Her current research project focuses on tracing late-­modern therapeutic discourses of romantic love in everyday practices of sexuality and intimacy in monogamous and non-­monogamous relationships within the

Contributors xi Netherlands. In her previous work, she was engaged with sexual self-­ fashioning among the Iranian-­Dutch, and a critical anthropology of aid development, specifically the case of Netherlands-­based adolescent sex education programs in Bangladesh. Lieke L. Schrijvers is a PhD candidate for a joint doctorate at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University and the Centre for Research on Culture and Gender at Ghent University. Her current research is a comparative ethnographic study of religion, gender, and sexuality among female converts in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities in the Netherlands. With this project, she is part of the NWO-­funded project Beyond ‘Religion versus Emancipation’: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Conversion to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Contemporary Western Europe. Maria Vliek is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies with a specialisation in Islam Studies and Fundamental Philosophy at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her research interests include anthropology of religion, secularism, and religious conversion. More specifically, she currently examines the narratives and testimonials of former Muslims in contemporary Europe. Matthea Westerduin is a PhD candidate in an NWO-­funded project and analyses the ways in which the categories of race, religion, and the secular are entangled with Christian theology in Western Europe. She worked with artist/activist Ioana Tudor on art projects about racism, whiteness, and exclusion. Bringing together scholars and activists, Matthea co-­ designed the postgraduate course ‘Masking the race-­religion constellation in Europe and the US’. In these projects she hopes to co-­create conditions to engage in more equal (scholarly) conversations about religion, race, and politics, in which alternative futures can be imagined and practised. Jelle O. Wiering is a cultural anthropologist whose main interest lies in the field of religious studies. He is a lecturer in religious studies and sociology at the University of Groningen and Utrecht University. He recently finished his PhD at the University of Groningen. This project focused on the intersections of religion, secularity, and sexuality in the Netherlands. Previously, he researched Western Buddhists, and Dutch pilgrims traveling to Santiago de Compostela.

Acknowledgements

This volume is the outcome of a long collaboration of the authors and editors, who were first brought together in the critical “Intensive Text Reading Seminar: The Challenge of Difference”, offered by the Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion (NOSTER) from 2011 onward. The seminar, chaired by Prof. Anne-­Marie Korte at Utrecht University, began as part of the networking project she initiated: “Interdisciplinary Innovations in the Study of Religion and Gender: Postcolonial, Post-­secular and Queer Perspectives.” This quickly developed from a mere monthly seminar to an engaging network of scholars in the field of religion and gender, as well as yearlong friendships. Throughout these years, we have been involved with each other’s work and developed a strong shared conceptual basis. Even though the themes and focus of our individual studies vary, we share the aim to bring the field of religious studies further via socially engaged, theoretically founded, and methodologically reflective research. The benefit of such a long-­term collaboration is evident: over the past years several of us have successfully defended PhD dissertations, received funding for new research, and worked together in publishing articles and organising conferences. Over the past years, members of this group participated in several conferences and meetings, such as but not limited to: the expert meeting “Queer Theory and the Study of Religion and Gender” at Barnard College, New York, in 2013; the conference “Religion, Gender and Body Politics” in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 2015; the conference “Women, Religions and Gender Relations” in Turin, Italy in 2016; and several of the (bi)annual conferences of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR), and the International Association for the Study of Religion and Gender (IARG). This volume is an outcome of these various collaborations and engagements. Most of the authors of this volume are located in the Netherlands and Belgium, and have been funded by several associations, including the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Besides our funders, we first give thanks to NOSTER for enabling the organisation of the “Intensive Text Reading Seminar: The Challenge of

Acknowledgements xiii Difference” and our respective home universities for support in organising this project and edited volume. The idea for this volume originated spontaneously while we, a group of scholars engaged in the study of religion, were enjoying a barbeque together in one of the contributors’ backyards to celebrate the end of the academic year in 2017. What started as an abstract ambition – induced by the combination of Summer, friendship, and drinks – led to a concrete plan and eventually to this volume. Over the course of two years, we regularly met with all the contributors to discuss one or two chapters. Each individual contributor was furthermore assigned two peer reviewers from the group. This opportunity to write in a group has resulted in a volume in which the materials might be different, but the conceptual points of departure are closely related. Working together has not only improved the theoretical grounding of the volume, but it has also been one of the highlights of our academic practice and community building. During the past years, a few who joined the book project unfortunately had to step down in different phases of the project, but they did contribute to the many peer review sessions we have had. We would like to thank Louise Autar, Kathrine van den Bogert, Evelien Geerts, Erik Meinema, Amal Miri, and Daan Oostveen. Even though they are not part of the final book, their contributions have been very important. We also had practical assistance from Jerrold Cuperus in organising the expert meeting with Pamela Klassen in 2020, and from Jorien Copier, Anja Havinga, and Nina Pennock from NOSTER in creating the practical preconditions for our seminar. We are further grateful to have met many other scholars who have contributed to our thinking about gender, sexuality, and religion. These were, first, others who participated in, or supervised, the seminar sessions over the past years: Sarah Bracke, Marco Derks, Margaretha van Es, Adriaan van Klinken, Ezra Ozyürek, Alexandra Rijke, and Berna Toprak. Some authors based their contribution on their dissertation research, so we thank their (former) PhD supervisors: Stefan Dudink, Charles Hirschkind, Willy Jansen, Kim Knibbe, Chia Longman, Katja Rakow, Gert Jan van der Heiden, and Karin van Nieuwkerk. We wholeheartedly thank Pamela Klassen for accepting our invitation to write the afterword to this volume. Yuga Harini and Joshua Wells were our editors at Routledge, and we are grateful for their support and enthusiasm for the volume and their confidence in our work as a group of mainly untenured academics. Thanks to the series editors of “Critical Studies in Religion, Gender and Sexuality” for welcoming our volume. As book editors, we are deeply grateful to the contributors to this volume, for their dedication, peer feedback, and insights. Your enthusiasm since the Summer of 2017 has made it all possible. – Mariecke van den Berg, Lieke L. Schrijvers, Jelle O. Wiering, and Anne-­Marie Korte

Transforming bodies and religions Powers and agencies in Europe Mariecke van den Berg, Lieke L. Schrijvers, and Jelle O. Wiering

Over the past decade, a variety of political, social, and economic transformations have significantly influenced the perception of religion in Europe. A growing popularity of populist and nationalist political ideologies draw on a renewed interest in the relation between religion, nation states, and the strengthening of national identities. These modes of thinking emphasise the symbolic meaning of what they promulgate as ‘Judeo-­Christian’ roots and values, which are – rather paradoxically – frequently understood as the grounds for progressive, and eventually irreligious, sexual ethics, and in other contexts as an incentive for the stressing of ‘traditional family values’. The (re)construction of a culturally and historically Christian Europe, moreover, is believed to be threatened by Islam as its religious, cultural, and racialised Other. This increasingly politicised view on religion is to a large extent played out on the body. Debates such as that over what has come to be known as the ‘burkini ban’ in France in 2016 show that the lines of proper citizenship and acceptable personhood are drawn through debates on religious dress, practices, and embodied presence in the public space. The increasing flow of discourse on ‘gender ideology’ from the Vatican is yet another example that accentuates that the body, gender, and sexuality are often at the core of debates over matters of belonging. This overwhelming focus on bodies ties in with more general trends which centralise the emotions and affects of some but neglect, misrepresent, or ridicule those of others, as can be observed in many discussions over blasphemous cartoons (Mahmood 2009). With this book, we aim to contribute to the understandings of these societal transformations by presenting a collection of chapters written from the perspective of a group of relatively young scholars. Our volume originates from a long-­term seminar dedicated to the study of religion and ‘the challenge of difference’, which focused on religion in the context of societal transformations in Europe such as the ones outlined earlier. Two years ago, this group of interdisciplinary scholars embarked on a new project and began to meet each month to discuss a contributor’s chapter that addressed transforming religious or irreligious bodies from this contributor’s (academic) perspective and background. These chapters have been put together

2  Mariecke van den Berg et al. in this book and constitute an interdisciplinary collection that explores religion and its relations with the body in Europe. The book thus studies ‘transforming bodies’: bodies that find themselves in the middle of European debates, social changes, and political forces, specified to the context of religion. We understand ‘transforming bodies’ in two – related – ways, depending on whether ‘transforming’ is taken to be an adjective or an infinitive. First, as an adjective, ‘transforming’ emphasises bodies themselves, pointing to the many ways in which bodies are subject to transformation. Although bodies may seem dependable and stable unities, they are, in fact, always changing and renewing. As Shahzad Bashir (2011) argues, the body we were born with is not the same body as the one we have later in life. Yet, Bashir continues, the illusion of a stable body that remains the same throughout life is a useful one, since it suggests coherent subjectivities (2011, 4). In our volume we maintain a suspicious attitude towards the assertion that bodies are whole, natural, and self-­evident, as such an understanding often is deployed to corroborate notions of identity as equally fixed and evident. Rather, we bear in mind that bodies, like identities, are always messy (Boisvert and Daniel-­Hughes 2017, 13), defying any definitive meaning. At the same time, we notice that in Europe today, some bodily transformations are scrutinised more closely – and contested more fiercely – than others. In our volume we examine some of these bodies-­in-­transformation that are subject to public scrutiny. The contributors, for example, discuss reproductive bodies (van Raemdonck), bodies from the Iranian diaspora in the Netherlands that are moving in and out of race categories (Roodsaz), bodies that become sick or pass away (Milota), bodies that move in or out of religion (Van den Brandt, Vliek), bodies involved in cross-­dressing or in a gender transition (Korte, Van den Berg), bodies that negotiate particular religious practices (Schrijvers), and bodies from religious minority groups that need to negotiate their traditions in different ways, based on different forms of racialisation (Mustafa and Westerduin). This varied selection of cases already shows some of the layers of the body in transformation: that of gender and sexuality, religion, race, ageing, health, and migration. This brings us to the second meaning of the term ‘transforming bodies’, in which ‘transforming’ is taken to be an infinitive, and where the emphasis is more on the relation between transformation and power. The volume departs from the postulate that bodily transformations are almost always subject to the influence of empowered actors and discourses. We therefore need to pay heed to the ways in which some transformations are cheered, encouraged, or even imposed, while others are rejected, contested, disciplined, or even criminalised or met with violence. At the same time, we want to emphasise that bodies are not simply ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault 1975) on which ideologies are played out. Rather, bodies have ‘corporeal agency’ (Krause 2011), sometimes talking back to the norms and conventions of society and perhaps even those of the individual to

Transforming bodies and religions 3 which they belong. In this volume we therefore investigate ‘transforming bodies’ as bodies that are subject to, contribute to, or aim to resist social transformations. In a similar vein, we consider religion to have multiple layers and a multidirectional relation to power. Seen from the so-­called constructivist approach to religion, religion is as a discursive and abstract notion that is constantly subject to powers that aim to shape, regulate, or stigmatise it. Religion thus frequently finds itself at the crossroad of different powers that seek to transform it for one reason or another. From another angle, though, ‘religion’ refers to a set of daily practices and rituals, often grounded in particular spaces and communities, which leads to the use of the pluralist notion of ‘religions’ or ‘religiosities’. In other words, religions are practised in everyday lives and given meaning through the day-­to-­day negotiations and experiences by both laypeople and clergy. This second approach is best captured by ‘the turn toward lived religion’ (e.g. McCarthy Brown 1991; Orsi 1985). The two approaches are of course not unrelated: daily life religion is influenced by broader power relations and public discourses, although it is not limited to this. In this volume, we aim to combine the different approaches to religion: like the body, religion can be subject to transformation, as well as a transformative phenomenon itself. The book provides various accounts that explore the relations between transforming bodies and religion from an amalgamation of theoretical perspectives. Some chapters draw on the conceptual insights provided by secular studies, others from those from gender-­critical theory, and yet others from those proposed by race and postcolonial studies. Following, we outline how these various approaches inform the research presented in this volume, but we first want to emphasise that, although the chapters tend to embrace one of these perspectives more than others, the book does depart from important theoretical postulate: all authors are committed to an intersectional approach. We thus acknowledge that bodies can never be reduced to gender, race, sexuality, or age. Rather, the interplay of these categories on the body necessitates more complex analyses of their various transformations. Before we move to an outline of the different contributions applied in this volume, however, we wish to explicate one aspect of the title of this volume, which suggests that the contributions all relate in one way or another to Europe. Already from the table of contents it will become clear that this is not always the case. Although most authors address a European context, several authors make comparisons to a non-­European context (Milota, Van Raemdonck), relate primarily to the Western but non-­European context of the United States (Van den Berg), or critically reflect on the notion of ‘Europe’ in the first place (Mustafa and Westerduin). As editors we have considered, therefore, to not specify any location in the title of this volume. However, we feel that the effect of such would once again be that Europe becomes the unstated, yet implicitly present geographical, cultural,

4  Mariecke van den Berg et al. or political point of departure. We therefore opted to stick to the notion of ‘Europe’ in our title, as most contributions in one way or another speak to this context, but emphasise the need to study Europe in relation to the Western and, especially, non-­western Others that are part and parcel of its formation and self-­understanding.

A post-­secularist perspective In contrast to the prior hegemonic understanding of religion that predicted a progressive declination of religion, religion is flourishing in contemporary societies across the world. One of the important tasks that the study of religion faces is to come to terms with the implicit expectations of secularisation that still abound both in academia and society as a whole. In this light, we apply a post-­secularist perspective as outlined by religious studies scholar Birgit Meyer: A post-­secularist perspective no longer takes secularization as the standard intrinsic to modernity, being alert instead to the specific ways in which the concept, role and place of religion – and its study – have been redefined with the rise of secularity. (Meyer 2012, 6) In this volume we want to contribute to this project of critical appraisal of persistent secular presumptions in understandings of religion. To do so, we build on insights from the recently emerged field of secular studies. The initial topic of inquiry into secular-­religious formations was secularism (an ideology that seeks to relegate religion to the private sphere) rather than secularity (an arrangement of religious/irreligious matters). This is understandable, as openly advocated ideologies are more easily accessible for researchers than the more concealed cultural environment that they are part of. Gradually, the notion of secularism as a morally neutral ideology became subject to extensive criticism, and many scholars took up the aim of ‘rethinking secularism’ (Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and VanAntwerpen 2011; Keane 2013; Asad et  al. 2013). The notion of secularism as more than a statecraft, subsequently, encouraged other scholars to explore how, and particularly what, secular politics actually seek to achieve or produce. Building on Asad’s (2003) articulation of the embeddedness of secularity in many facets of Western culture, the focus has shifted somewhat to an exploration of the embodied configurations and body politics that prevail in secular climates (Hirschkind 2011; Engelke 2015; Scheer, Fadil, and Schepelern Johansen 2019). Charles Hirschkind’s attempt of finding an ‘ontological’ secular body has suggested that the essence of secularity does not consist of a specific set of embodied dispositions, but rather concerns a particular capacity to mobilise the religious/secular tension in a productive way (Hirschkind 2011, 643–644). Seen from this perspective, particular phenomena are perceived

Transforming bodies and religions 5 to be religious or irreligious not because they ‘are’ so in an ontological sense, but because they have been identified as such by particular powers in specific contexts. This implies that the religious and the secular are never stable, but co-­constitutive, the understanding of which is pivotal for gaining a more comprehensive understanding of both concepts. This understanding of religion and secularity as co-­constitutive forms the grounds of the post-­secularist perspective used in this volume. Various attempts of identifying religion and secularity are examined to understand how constructions of (what is propagated as) the religious and the irreligious take place in society, but in particular how these acts of identification relate to transforming bodies. Maria Vliek, for example, shows how people who move out of Islam negotiate, and give meaning to, notions of non-­religion in their daily life. In response to discussions of the secular body, Vliek carefully analyses how her interlocutors perform non-­ religion via bodily acts, such as drinking alcohol or engaging in premarital sex. In his chapter on the Dutch field of sexual health, Jelle O. Wiering explores what notions of sexuality are propagated in this setting and how these understandings of sex are, explicitly or implicitly, proposed as a superior alternative to supposedly ‘religious’ understandings of sex. Such acts that ostensibly separate the religious from the irreligious serve to let secular sexual health professionals more convincingly promote their own understandings of sexuality and to discourage other approaches. An van Raemdonck, then, analyses the construction of a religious/secular binary in sexual health policies, by comparing Roman-­ Catholic institutional and non-­institutional voices. In her chapter, van Raemdonck illuminates broader societal processes in which gender and sexuality politics become identified as secular. And yet another chapter, by Megan Milota, analyses the role of religion in supposedly secular spaces of medicine via a close reading of the autobiography of a doctor who is terminally ill. In particular, by focusing on these acts of identification, the authors show how categories of religion and secularity are enmeshed with, or even used as a distraction for, processes of inclusion and exclusion along the axes of class, ethnicity, race, and gender.

Religion, gender, and sexuality Gender and sexuality often figure prominently in contemporary European debates over national identity and belonging. Two questions inform our approach in particular. The first is: how are gendered and sexualised bodies implied in the European politics of belonging? (cf. Yuval-­Davis 2006) And, second: how do embodied forms of resistance to these nationalist amalgamations of religion, secularity, gender, and sexuality come into being? We are thus asking how the politics of national identity and belonging relate to sexuality and gender, and how people perhaps seek to resist the forms of cultivation that these nationalist rhetoric pursue.

6  Mariecke van den Berg et al. Gender, sexuality, and the politics of belonging In many Western European societies like the Netherlands, policies geared at the emancipation of LGBTQ persons have been rather successful, particularly regarding the legal protection against discrimination and adjustments to family law. Although success in terms of legal emancipation does not necessarily imply success at social or symbolic levels (Hekma 2016), LGBTQ people and symbols have an increasing visibility in the public sphere. There are some celebrities and politicians in the Netherlands who openly identify as LGBTQ, and the national ‘festivity curriculum’ is difficult to imagine without Gay Pride parades. The growing acceptance of LGBTQ people is paralleled by the changing (and complicated) position of religion in society. Although religion is often seen as an inhibiting factor for LGBTQ emancipation, David Bos (2010) has observed that, at least in the Netherlands, Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy have been at the forefront of this struggle, advocating in public a more pastoral attitude towards sexual minorities (gays and lesbians in particular). Still, religion is often accused of being intolerant and/or backward in many Western European societies, and where it was once self-­evidently present in the public sphere, it is now often (‘ideally’) relegated to the private sphere (van den Berg et al. 2014). In this process some religious groups have, in fact, made sexual and gender politics one of their identity markers (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2004; Viefhues-­Bailey 2010). As a result of these shifts, religion, gender, and sexuality have come to function differently in imaginations of belonging. Bodies and freedoms of women and LGBTQ persons are increasingly called upon to form the symbolic demarcation of boundaries of belonging. The conditions for ‘good citizenship’ thus are frequently bound to the acceptance of gender equality and sexual diversity (Dudink 2011; El Tayeb 2011; Mepschen, Duyvendak, and Tonkens 2010; Hurenkamp, Tonkens, and Duyvendak 2012). This has consequences in particular for non-­Western migrant minorities, who are suspected of not meeting these requirements. Whether it be in the co-­optation of queer bodies in projects of nationalism (Puar 2007) or in limiting Muslim women in wearing the veil (Scott 2010), gender and sex seem to be crucial in stereotypical representations of the racial and ethnic Other. The work of Joan Scott is important in this regard (2010, 2018), as she pointed to the implicit secular assumptions underlying these othering mechanisms. While religion is often ‘blamed’ for instilling and maintaining patriarchal norms and defending homophobic positions, Scott outlined how, throughout history, secular actors (much like religious ones) set out to instil particular patriarchal norms of gender and sexuality (cf. Klassen 2015). Scholars such as Jasbir Puar and Nilufer Göle further inform this critical framework by unmasking gendered secular and nationalist tendencies, and questioning the supposed oppressed status of Muslim women (Fadil 2011; Göle 2015, 103–135; Jouili 2015).

Transforming bodies and religions 7 Agency Since ‘transforming bodies’ addresses two sides of the same coin (bodies that transform and that are subject to transformation), our analysis does not stop at the question of how bodies are affected by societal or political change. We also want to investigate how bodies negotiate the ways in which they are framed, regulated, and co-­opted. Or, in other words: how bodies affect and negotiate societal change. This brings us to another central concept, namely that of (religious) agency. Feminist approaches in the academic institutes of gender studies in Europe have been pre-­eminently secular (King and Beattie 2005; Korte 2011). The cause for the neglect of religion as a category of interest can probably be found in the history of gender studies in second wave movements. During the 1970s and 1980s, emancipation movements perceived religion  – and the Christian church in particular – primarily as patriarchal institutes that limited women in their personal, public, and political freedom. This anti-­ religious form of women’s emancipation departs from an understanding of agency as primarily individual, empowering, and directed toward resistance to patriarchy. Traditional religion, from this point of view, constitutes the antithesis of liberal understandings of sex and gender, and is seen as a primarily patriarchal structure that limits the potential for women’s emancipation and liberation.1 These perspectives, and the irreligious interpretation of agency that it hinges on, have more recently been questioned from within gender studies (e.g. Braidotti 2008; Hawthorne 2011), but nevertheless continue to influence gender research throughout Europe.2 In this volume, we go beyond such conceptualisations by including in our analysis the concept of religious agency. Saba Mahmood’s well-­known work on women in Islamic revival movements in Egypt raised questions about the central concept of agency in feminist academia and accentuated its assumption of being connected to resistance against the burden of tradition (Mahmood 2005). Mahmood criticised this individualised feminist secularism as socio-­cultural project, and argued for a recognition of a multitude of women’s agencies. Agency should also be conceptualised within religious traditions, as the desire to adhere to norms or submit to a transcendental will, which “describe[s] a whole range of human action, including those which might be socially, ethically, or politically indifferent to the goal of opposing hegemonic norms.” (2005, 9). Sarah Bracke further relates to this project as “[t]hinking from the lives of women who most often fall out of the realms of those considered as ‘emancipated subjects’ [and that] simultaneously makes use of feminist methodologies while investigating and challenging existing feminist theories” (2008, 53). This consideration of ‘religious agency’ has influenced a great deal of scholarship (e.g. Avishai 2008), and it also reappears throughout this volume. Several contributors focus on women’s religious compliance and observance. Schrijvers, for example, examines several modes of negotiation of Jewish patriarchal customs by converted women. While some might

8  Mariecke van den Berg et al. invoke a feminist liberal discourse, other new Jewish women find spiritual value in the particular roles assigned to women. Van den Brandt’s chapter, too, elaborates on religious observance of women who convert by analysing two autobiographies as forms of religious storytelling. Yet, we do not take categories such as gender, sex, or religion as self-­ evident but analyse them in their particular geographical, temporal, and intersectional space. Furthermore, these notions do not merely exist in the discursive abstract, but are concepts built from the ground up: situated in daily life realities and contestations. We consider it important to analyse how gender is conceived, reproduced, and subverted. This enables the use of gender and sexuality as epistemological and analytical tools to include a variety of bodies, including LGB, heterosexual, cis, intersex, trans*, masculine, feminine, and non-­binary bodies. These are not fixed identity positions, but rather intersectional categorisations that reflect performative societal discourses and individual experiences. The chapters by Anne-­Marie Korte and Mariecke van den Berg focus on these intersections of LGBTQ and religion in particular by, respectively, focusing on the religiously loaded performance of Drag Sethlas and the relation between religious and transgender transformations. Korte draws a parallel between the controversy generated by Drag Sethlas’ deliberate interplay of sexuality and religious themes and the larger interrelation of religious, sexual, and ethnic identities as a major bone of contention in contemporary European societies. van den Berg proposes, in her chapter, to think of both gender and religious change together, as the one is often implied in the other. To summarise so far, this volume combines a post-­secularist and a gender-­ critical approach. We borrow from religious studies the understanding of religion in its powerful symbolic, political, and social value. Religion can be exploited to establish group boundaries, and it can be a discursive space where gender and sexual normativities are formed that potentially limit the space of women’s individual sexual and gendered freedom. At the same time, religion is recognised as an important feature of daily life and a potential source of meaning and agency for many religious actors, including women and LGBTQ people. We examine and elaborate how various forms of agency are informed by structural developments, negotiated, and potentially subversive. And similarly, the chapters study how different experiences, representations, performances, and performativities render meaning to gender and sexuality. Religion and secularity, however, do not only intersect with gender and sexuality. A third important strand of theory that informed this volume comes from their relation with race.

Religion, race, and postcolonialism Religion has played an important role in colonialism and continues to be a marker of difference among many people globally. Therefore, when studying the body and its relations with religion, one should include a study of

Transforming bodies and religions 9 racial, ethnic, and cultural difference. This argument that race and religion are connected is not new. Edward Said and Frantz Fanon already pointed to the centrality of the religious body in colonial and decolonial imaginings. Hannah Arendt devoted her work to understanding racism and antisemitism. And womanist and black liberation theologians such as James Cone and Delores Williams advocated for inclusivity within religious discourse. These interventions were largely informed by social events or social movements, especially in the latter context of the US civil rights movements, with both Islam and Christianity taking main stage via figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This is not limited to the US context alone; religion has long been present in social movements throughout the world, either as a source of empowerment, an institution to be criticised, or a neutral safeguard for victims. Yet thinking of religion, race, and gender together has proven difficult. Women of colour have questioned the overt whiteness and colour blindness of many feminist movements and theories. Likewise, as argued in the previous section, religion has long been absent from dominant fields of gender studies. Religious studies, moreover, also tend to ignore questions of racial difference (Hawthorne 2011). In our volume we commit to an intersectional approach and effort to put these different fields into dialogue: an approach that was introduced by female scholars of colour in order to enable more layered analyses of oppression that do justice to the complexity of daily life and differently located (individual and social) bodies. Intersectionality first and foremost implies a move away from one single category (often: gender) as the central and dominant category of analysis in favour of a more complex analysis of the workings of power that includes other “categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies” (Davis 2008). Although intersectional theory has sometimes been criticised for its lack of a solid definition (Nash 2008), we find this complexity explained in a clear and concise manner in the definition offered by Lisa Bowleg: Intersectionality is a theoretical framework for understanding how multiple social identities such as race, gender, sexual orientation, SES, and disability intersect at the micro level of individual experience to reflect interlocking systems of privilege and oppression (i.e., racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism) at the macro socialstructural level. (2012, 1267) This volume works from this definition, while stressing that here and elsewhere, religion needs to be more prominently present in the list of relevant social identities. This does not imply that we perceive ‘religion’ to be a seemingly isolate-­able social space or identity category. Rather, we understand religion to be interwoven with race in a variety of ways.

10  Mariecke van den Berg et al. Race and religion In order to account for this intersection, we want to highlight what Anya Topolski (2018) has coined as the “race-­religion constellation”. Building on the work of Tomoko Masuzawa (2005), Gil Anidjar (2008) and others, Topolski developed this notion to denote “the practice of classifying people into races according to categories we now associate with the term ‘religion” (Topolski 2018, 59). Racial divides have not only been established on the basis of what we now term ‘religion’: the formation of a modern comparative category of ‘religion’ (as something separate from the ‘secular’) is also intimately tied to constructions of (non)Christianness and (non)whiteness. As an idealised version of Christianity, the category of ‘religion’ has been largely conceptualised in contrast to its negative mirror images of ‘Judaism’, ‘Islam’, or ‘idolatry’. These were classified as ‘non-­religion’, ‘not-­yet-­ religion’, or ‘improper religion’ and were mutually imbricated with ‘race’. In both early colonial and post-­Enlightenment epistemologies, particular types of worship have been considered to be indicative of people’s political, cultural, and biological inclinations (Jennings 2010, see also Maldonado-­ Torres 2014). The drawing and redrawing of lines between ‘religion’ and its outsiders (‘irreligion’, ‘idolatry’, ‘Judaism’, ‘Islam’, etc.) have thus been intimately tied to the drawing and redrawing of lines between ‘human’ and its outsiders (‘non-­human’, ‘woman’, ‘irrational-­human’, ‘Oriental’, ‘African’). Consequently, the emergence of a modern category of ‘religion’ cannot be understood outside of this dynamic, both inside ‘Europe’ as metropolitan empire and in the context of colonised peripheries.3 Here, it would be helpful to lay out more in detail how we use the concept of ‘race’ and what it means to apply a race-­sensitive intersectional approach in the context of Europe. Stuart Hall argued that race – much like religion and the secular, we add  – is a discursive, relational, cultural, and collective concept (Hall 1997). The question whether this term of race, with its specific genealogy in the colonisation of Africa and enslavement of black people, can be applied to other contexts as well continues to be a topic of academic debate. In 1991, Etienne Balibar famously asked whether we can see a new form of racism emerging in late 20th-­century Europe, or whether this is a reiteration of already existing structures, as a form of ‘neo-­racism’ (Balibar 1991). In response, Anya Topolski argues that: The race-­religion constellation makes clear that what is at the roots of this distinction is the privileging of Christianity (or in today’s discourse secularism) over the religion of Muslims. The category is still present although the process of racialization is significantly different. (Topolski 2018, 73) Yet other scholars disagree with this view and point to the rather different histories of African Americans and people in Muslim majority countries. Nilüfer Göle, to name one, rhetorically asks whether terms such as

Transforming bodies and religions 11 “xenophobia, cultural racism, racism ‘from above’ . . . can . . . also enable us to understand the current tension of European publics toward Islam?” (2017, 32). According to Göle, race and racism cannot be simply added to the situation of Muslims in Europe, because these terms omit any importance of spirituality or the divine; it de-­Islamises the context of Muslims. In this volume, we take a position in between and reflect on the limits and value of intersectionality. The critical approach from race studies and postcolonial studies can be very important in understanding the current-­day place of religion in Europe. At the same time, questions of race are not inherently and uncritically questions of religion, nor the other way around. Yet, the interlinked history and context of these fields are indisputable, which is a terrain that several authors explore in their contributions. Rahil Roodsaz elaborates in her chapter on religious disengagement of Iranian-­Dutch people in relation to the racialisation of Muslims in European discourse. Becoming ‘modern’, as her interlocutors often aspire, is according to Roodsaz both a process of non-­religiosity and of racial (dis)identifications. Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin further discuss their own experiences regarding the prevailing understandings of religion and race in the Netherlands and their observation of how narrow notions of race often hold back serious engagements with race and whiteness in academia.

Outline of the book This edited volume combines the critical theoretical frameworks addressed herein, in order to understand ‘transforming bodies’ in relation to power, agency, and religion. The chapters have been divided into three main sections, which all take a different level of inquiry as their starting point. As such, the book crosses methodological boundaries, in order to understand how similar powers of religion and secularity play out on, or are shaped by, different bodies. We thus aim to look at different types of bodies – from global governing bodies of human rights to ethnographic thick descriptions of local daily life  – while informed by the same body of theory of post-­ secularist, postcolonial/critical race, and gender/queer approaches in the study of religion. Before each subsection, the authors reflect on the theme of the book and the connections among the chapters and introduce their contributions more fully. The first section brings three chapters together that focus on ‘Governing Bodies’. Wiering, van Raemdonck, and Korte all explore societal attempts that seek to cultivate bodies, as well as embodied performances that aim to resist these cultivations. Wiering opens the section with an auto-­ethnographic account of his fieldwork experiences in sexual health education, where he was trained as an educator. His own frank and open reflections on moments of failure are linked to broader discussions on how the secular body politic creates “ideal bodies”, via a biomedical focus on sex and notions of normalcy. Both implicit and explicit, these body politics are heavily dependent

12  Mariecke van den Berg et al. on the construction of a religious ‘other’, to affirm its self-­image as progressive and liberated. An van Raemdonck focuses on sexual health politics as well, but takes a different starting point by focusing on discursive engagements with Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR). She shows that SRHR politics implicitly rely on a secular understanding of sex, which are questioned or affirmed by religious groups in different ways. She compares the engagement with SRHR from the Holy See – which has a naturalistic understanding of sex – and from non-­institutional Roman Catholic voices, who in turn defend sexual and reproductive health. The third chapter of this first section on ‘governing bodies’, by Anne-­ Marie Korte, also focuses on the relation between institutional and non-­ institutional voices. In her contribution, Korte analyses public and judicial responses to a 2017 performance of Drag Sethlas in Spain, in which s/he performed both as the Virgin Mary and as Jesus Christ. Korte compares the outrage and controversy regarding this act with other performances where gender play with religious symbols led to blasphemy accusations. The second section then elaborates on ‘Narrating Bodies’. In this part, van den Brandt, van den Berg, Milota, and Mustafa and Westerduin engage in the analysis of literature from various genres to see how bodies are expressed in texts. Starting from narrative material – such as personal narratives, memoirs, or semi-­autobiographic novels – this section explores how literature is related to questions of race, religion, gender, and transformation. In Chapter 4, van den Brandt analyses four memoirs produced by women who have converted to Judaism or Islam. In this chapter, van den Brandt uses the concept of ‘symbolic syncretism’ to reflect on the process of storytelling in conversion narratives, and offers a close reading of the memoirs in order to see how women’s conversion is related to questions of gender and sexuality. Moving into a religion, van den Brandt argues, is an embodied process of transformation, which in turn is ‘transformed’ into text via memoirs. van den Berg continues the exploration of transformative narratives in her chapter about Jewish religious and gendered stories of change in Chapter 5. van den Berg opts to think of gender transformations (such as transgender transitions) and religious transformations (such as conversion or revitalisation) together, as both processes are often intimately linked. Moreover, the chosen autobiographies of Joy Ladin and Leah Lax question the  – often simplistic – “misery-­turning-­to-­happiness” trope that often dominates contemporary literature about transitions. In Chapter  6, Megan Milota uses the concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom, to explore the role of literature in the transformation of the ethics of both author and readers. She does so by offering an innovative multidisciplinary approach of literary analysis and the analysis of readers’ responses. Her material is the autobiographical novel When Breath Becomes Air (2016), in which former surgeon Paul Kalanithi reflects upon

Transforming bodies and religions 13 his transformation from doctor to patient when he comes to suffer from a fatal illness. This in turn has a transformative effect on medical students engaging with the work. Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin take yet another approach to narrative in Chapter  7, the last chapter in this section. Their text is the result of a series of personal exchanges in which they reflect on the role of race and whiteness in academic knowledge production. Here they argue that the dominance of white perspectives in academia has led to the acceptance of certain forms of knowledge and the discarding of other forms. Departing firmly from their own particular histories and locations, this chapter shows how a situated reading of fundamental texts (such as the Bible) enables a critical perspective on the relation among race, religion, and knowledge. Lastly, section three brings together contributions about daily life realities via ‘Negotiating Bodies’: bodies engaged in mediations regarding supposedly correct forms of expression. In Chapter  8, Maria Vliek explores the embodied aspects of the process of people moving out of Islam in the Netherlands and the UK. Bodies, she argues, form an important part of processes of belonging either to a religious community or to the realm of the secular in how they – for instance – act, eat, or make love. A focus on the body as it transforms ‘out of religion’ shows, among other things, that there is no neat demarcation between ‘in’ and ‘out’ of Islam. Rahil Roodsaz’s Chapter 9 addresses the ways practices of self-­fashioning of Iranian-­Dutch draw on the body. In particular, Roodsaz explores intersections of religion and race in expressions of Iranian-­Dutch self-­identification belonging to Dutch, secular majority culture rather than Muslim minority culture. However, in a context where having sabzeh, ‘brown’, skin is predominantly associated with Turkish and Moroccan immigrants and therefore (admittedly, already a rather limited perspective) with Islam, many Iranian-­Dutch find themselves ‘moving in and out of whiteness’ in their practices of non-­religiosity. As such, they mirror Western assumptions on self-­evident relations between ethnicity and religion. Finally, in the last chapter of this section, Lieke Schrijvers discusses how converted women in liberal Jewish congregations in the Netherlands embody their religious transformation, focusing on the practice of wearing the tallit (prayer shawl). While on the one hand, the tallit as a visible marker of Jewishness might affirm inclusion for converts, it is historically a symbol of Jewish maleness, and its use by women has been subject to controversy. Schrijvers traces how this ritual object functions in ambivalent ways in converts’ processes of embodying their Jewish identities as belonging-­yet-­different. In order to invite the interaction between academic spaces within and outside of geographic Europe, we have asked renowned scholar of religion Pamela Klassen from the University of Toronto to write a response to the volume.

14  Mariecke van den Berg et al. In the Afterword, Klassen reflects on the aims of the book as a whole, as well as the individual chapters, by focusing on three themes: classification and concept; narration and genre; and collectivity and individual. Important questions for the future study of religion are asked here, which move beyond the scope of this volume itself, by distilling important issues from the contributions. Klassen insists that it is “always productive to think locally, temporally, and systematically within specific times and places to see the ways that gender, race, religion, and sexuality are both fluid and fixed, enabling and constraining” (pp. 223), and we wholeheartedly agree with this argument.

Notes 1 In contrast to ‘traditional religions’, topics such as ‘spirituality’ are often addressed in the scope of feminist scholarship and even recognised in its emancipatory potential. Similar to public conceptions and life experiences, spirituality is often delineated from ‘religion’. This distinction is based on a false assumption that ‘spirituality’ refers to agency and authenticity, while ‘religion’ implies structural and patriarchal structures. We understand both ‘spirituality’ and ‘religion’ to be located in a particular historical discursive context in which different types of agency are formed (cf. Fedele and Knibbe 2013; Utriainen 2011). 2 In theology, feminist scholars have a rather marginal position, and the role of religious actors in feminist movements tends to be disregarded in genealogies of feminist struggles (Llewellyn and Trzebiatowska 2013; Loughlin 2007). Modern womanist theology is even more marginal and has not sufficiently been taken into mainstream theology. 3 This argument will be presented and elaborated further upon in Matthea Westerduin’s forthcoming PhD dissertation called: “Displacements and loss in the Muslim question. Re-­membering the making of race, religion, and whiteness in Europe and its colonies” (working title), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

References Anidjar, Gil. 2008. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. 2013. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Avishai, Orit. 2008. “ ‘Doing Religion’ in a Secular World: Women in Conservative Religions and the Question of Agency.” Gender & Society 22 (4): 409–433. Balibar, Etienne. 1991. “Is There a ‘Neo-­Racism’?” In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by  Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, 9–19. London: Verso. Bashir, Shahzad. 2011. Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam. New York: Columbia University Press. Boisvert, Donald L. and Carly Daniel-­ Hughes. 2017. “Introduction.” In The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion, Sexuality, and Gender, edited by Donald L. Boisvert and Carly Daniel-­Hughes, 13–15. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Transforming bodies and religions 15 Bos, David. 2010. De Aard, de Daad en het Woord. Een Halve Eeuw Opinie-­en Besluitvorming over Homoseksualiteit in Protestants Nederland, 1959–2009. The Hague: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. Bowleg, Lisa. 2012. “The Problem with the Phrase ‘Women and Minorities’: Intersectionality – an Important Theoretical Framework for Public Health.” American Journal of Public Health 102 (7): 1267–1273. Bracke, Sarah. 2008. “Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency. Contours of a ‘Post-­Secular’ Conjuncture.” Theory, Culture and Society 25 (6): 51–67. Braidotti, Rosi. 2008. “In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism.” Theory, Culture & Society 25 (6): 1–24. Calhoun, Craig, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. 2011. Rethinking Secularism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, Kathy. 2008. “Intersectionality as Buzzword. A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful.” Feminist Theory 9 (1): 67–85. Dudink, Stefan. 2011. “Homosexuality, Race, and the Rhetoric of Nationalism.” History of the Present 1 (2): 259–264. El Tayeb, Fatima. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Engelke, Matthew. 2015. “ ‘Good without God’: Happiness and Pleasure Among the Humanists.” Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (3): 69–91. Fadil, Nadia. 2011. “Not-­/Unveiling as an Ethical Practice.” Feminist Review 98 (1): 83–109. Fedele, Anna and Kim E. Knibbe (Eds.). 2013. Gender and Power in Contemporary Spirituality: Ethnographic Approaches, Vol. 26. New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage. Göle, Nilüfer. 2015. Islam and Secularity: The Future of Europe’s Public Sphere. Durham: Duke University Press. Göle, Nilüfer. 2017. The Daily Lives of Muslims. Islam and Pubic Confrontation in Contemporary Europe. London: Zed Books. Hall, Stuart. 1997. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Hawthorne, Sian. 2011. “Religion and Gender.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Peter B. Clarke, 134–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hekma, Gert. 2016. “Queer in the Netherlands: Pro-­Gay and Anti-­Sex-­Sexual Politics at a Turning Point.” In Queer in Europe, edited by Lisa Downing and Robert Gillett, 151–164. London: Routledge. Hirschkind, Charles. 2011. “Is There a Secular Body?” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 633–647. Hurenkamp, Menno, Evelien Tonkens and Jan Willem Duyvendak. 2012. Crafting Citizenship. Negotiating Tensions in Modern Society. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jakobsen, Janet and Ann Pellegrini. 2004. Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press. Jennings, William James. 2010. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press.

16  Mariecke van den Berg et al. Jouili, Jeanette. 2015. Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Keane, Webb. 2013. “Secularism as a Moral Narrative of Modernity.” Transit: Europäische Revue 43: 159–170. King, Ursula and Tina Beattie, eds. 2005. Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross-­ Cultural Perspectives. London: Continuum. Klassen, Pamela E. 2015. “Fantasies of Sovereignty: Civic Secularism in Canada.” Critical Research on Religion 3 (1): 41–56. Korte, Anne-­Marie. 2011. “Openings: A Genealogical Introduction to Religion and Gender.” Religion and Gender 1 (1): 1–17. Krause, Sharon R. 2011. “Bodies in Action: Corporeal Agency and Democratic Politics.” Political Theory 39 (3): 299–324. Llewellyn, Dawn and Marta Trzebiatowska. 2013. “Secular and Religious Feminisms: A Future of Disconnection?” Feminist Theology 21 (3): 244–258. Loughlin, Gerard, ed. 2007. Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body. Oxford: Blackwell. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2009. “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” Critical Inquiry 35 (4): 836–862. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2014. “Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World.” Journal of Religious Ethics 42 (4): 691–711. Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions. Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McCarthy Brown, Karen. 1991. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mepschen, Paul, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and Evelien H. Tonkens. 2010. “Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands.” Sociology 44 (5): 962–979. Meyer, Birgit. 2012. Mediation and the Genesis of Presence. Toward a Material Approach to Religion. Inaugural Lecture 19 December, Utrecht University. Nash, Jennifer C. 2008. “Re-­thinking Intersectionality.” Feminist Review 89 (1): 1–15. Orsi, Robert. 1985. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem. New Haven: Yale University Press. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press. Scheer, Monique, Nadia Fadil, and Birgitte Johansen Schepelern. 2019. Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions. London: Bloomsbury Academic Scott, Joan W. 2010. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, Joan W. 2018. Sex and Secularism. Princeton University Press. Topolski, Anya. 2018. “The Race-­Religion Constellation: A European Contribution to the Critical Philosophy of Race.” Critical Philosophy of Race 6 (1): 58–81. Utriainen, Tehri. 2011. “The Post-­Secular Position and Enchanted Bodies.” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 23: 417–432. Van den Berg, Mariecke, David J. Bos, Marco Derks, Ruard R. Ganzevoort, Miloš Jovanović, Anne-­ Marie Korte, and Srdjan Sremac. 2014. “Religion,

Transforming bodies and religions 17 Homosexuality, and Contested Social Orders in the Netherlands, the Western Balkans, and Sweden.” In Religion in Times of Crisis, edited by Gladys Ganiel, Heidemarie Winkel and Christophe Monnot, 116–134. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Viefhues-­Bailey, L. H. 2010. Between a Man and a Woman?: Why Conservatives Oppose Same-­Sex Marriage. New York: Columbia University Press. Yuval-­Davis, Nira. 2006. “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging.” Patterns of Prejudice 40 (3): 197–214.

Introduction to governing bodies Jelle O. Wiering, An van Raemdonck, and Anne-­Marie Korte Introduction This section brings three studies together that explore bodies that govern: bodies that perform particular practices in order to promote, problematise, and thus try to cultivate particular notions and forms of behaviour and bodily appearance. The chapters thus discuss the ways that people use their bodies to convince others about how they should use their bodies ‘properly’. Since this book explores the body and its various relations with religion, a focus on the regulation and government of these bodies directs one to secular power: How do secular actors perceive religious articulations of the body? How are such religious notions framed, negotiated, and governed by secular actors such as the state? What embodied configurations and sensibilities do secular actors advocate, and how is the irreligious body conceived of? And how do people that find themselves somewhere between the state’s notions of the body and those propagated by church officials navigate their way through these different authoritative discourses? The upcoming chapters aim to answer these questions by zooming in on three case studies: a study of the body in the Dutch field of sexual health; a discussion of the body in sexual and reproductive health and rights; and finally, an analysis of the case of Drag Sethlas, who was prosecuted by the Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers for her/his winning show on the Drag Queen Gala in the Carnival period in Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria in 2017. All three chapters depart from one important assumption: no body is secular or religious in an essentialist sense. All bodies identified in our cases as secular or religious are articulated as such because particular actors consider and promote them as such. These chapters thus build on the work of Charles Hirschkind, whose reflexive analysis of the secular body suggested that the secular is: a distinct mode of power, one that mobilizes the productive tension between religious and secular to generate new practices through a process of internal self-­differentiation. The boundaries of our categories

20  Jelle O. Wiering et al. religious and secular do not preexist this process but are continuously determined and reciprocally redefined within it. (Hirschkind 2011: 643) The chapters in this section are mainly concerned with how these boundaries of the secular and the religious are determined, in what context, and by whom. This implies that we do not conceive of secularity as an irreligious alternative to religion, but rather as a collection of practices that seek to identify and propose what religion consists of. These practices are the main concern of our contributions to this volume. As will become clear in the next chapters, some topics keep returning in struggles related to secularity. In their 2013 book, Cady and Fessenden already argued that clashes over religion often take place in the context of sexuality and gender (2013, VII). Our chapters seek to further specify this argument, exploring typical trajectories where these clashes take place. A first observation in this regard is that the boundaries of the religious and the irreligious body are often negotiated through the category of nature. Feminist historian Joan Scott argued that proponents of both irreligion and religion suggest that their ideologies and practices are grounded in nature (Scott 2013: 25–46), but the upcoming chapters go further, articulating the mechanisms and rhetoric through which interpretations of the natural are promulgated as superior. All three chapters show how ideas about supposedly correct interpretations of nature serve to delegitimise other claims about the body. Wiering’s chapter shows how sex education classes repeatedly evoke supposedly natural features of the body to distance these from – and in doing so, problematise – social ones. Van Raemdonck’s chapter, then, shows how Roman Catholic understandings of the natural body are mobilised against visions of the (social) body that can be transformed and liberated through sexual and reproductive rights. Finally, Korte’s chapter shows how Drag Sethlas’ body and forms of embodiment are geared towards confronting both religious and irreligious people with their assumptions of what natural sex and sexuality supposedly consist of. Another key trajectory through which both religious and irreligious actors aim to carve out differences between religion and irreligion is science. Irreligious notions of the body communicated in sex education are suggested to be grounded in science to, thereby, distance these understandings from supposed religious anachronist interpretations. But the chapters also show how religious actors also evoke science to reintroduce arguments that previously build on theological assumptions. An example of this is the principle that the moment of conception constitutes the very start of human life that has the right of protection. In such cases, these religious actors accuse opponents to intentionally downplay these arguments’ scientific veracity because it hampers their emancipatory aims. A third and final category that we distinguish from the chapters is sexual pleasure. Proposed by some as a human right and by others as a somewhat

Introduction to governing bodies 21 self-­centred distraction from more important issues such as family values, sexual pleasure constitutes a key, if not the, bone of contention that returns in the three chapters. Wiering and van Raemdonck’s chapters show that female sexual pleasure is often considered as an important pivot for obtaining feminist ideals and experiencing full gender equality. Korte’s chapter even clearer elucidates how sexual pleasure is evoked to problematise conventional understandings of sex and sexuality, to subsequently propose a different delineation between the religious and the irreligious, which conjoins religion and liberal notions of sexuality. These three trajectories serve to provide claims about the body with extra authority. Both religious and irreligious actors corroborate their advocated understanding of the body by claiming that the interpretation of nature, science, or sexual pleasure that undergirds it is the correct or proper one. This not only ascribed one’s own claim about the body with extra authority, but it also delegitimises any potential counter-­argument. These attempts aim to undermine the other group’s articulations of the body by rendering these as ridiculous, anachronist, or inappropriate. Hence, one can see how the idea of a conflict between two supposedly totally different realms of reality is ‘made up’: religious and irreligious actors both seek to distance themselves from each other, by presenting a polarised representation of the irreligious and the religious that is grounded in stereotypes. Korte’s case of Drag Sethlas beautifully captures the simplicity of such polarised representations and invites a post-­secularist understanding where religion is not limited to its stereotypical image as prudish and conservative. The upcoming three chapters thus not only illustrate that unnuanced dispensations of the religious and the secular are simplistic and inaccurate. They also indicate that the secular act of conceptualising and promulgating such representations is actually an important strategy for both irreligious and religious actors to pursue their ideal conceptualisations of the body. Through problematising the Other’s proposed embodied configurations, and through accentuating a purportedly incommensurable divide (Mahmood 2009, 836) between religious and irreligious bodies, both groups seek to gain more power to advocate their own conceptualisations of the body.

References Cady, Linell. E. and Tracy Fessenden, eds. 2013. Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference. New York: Columbia University Press. Hirschkind, Charles. 2011. “Is There a Secular Body?” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 633–647. Mahmood, Saba. 2009. “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” Critical Inquiry 35 (4): 836–862.

1 The secular body in the Dutch field of sexual health Jelle O. Wiering

Introduction1 I am an observer in a sexuality education class for students of secondary vocational education (MBO). The mixed-­sex lesson is held at a school in a small town in the centre of the Netherlands. The class consists of 21 students, aged between 15 and 20, I estimate. Much like the students, I am carefully listening to our two sexuality educators, Miranda and Trudy. Both are women in their forties and both work for the Community Health Service (CHS, GGD in Dutch). We are about halfway through the lesson when Miranda poses a question about the relationship between love and sex. Nobody appears eager to respond. Finally, after quite some time, a boy answers her question: “Well, I think you cannot have good sex without knowing each other pretty well. I think tha-­” The boy is interrupted by Miranda, who says: Well, a one-­night stand does not necessarily have to do anything with love, does it? It really differs, you know. At our CHS consulting hour, we meet youngsters who deem it [the combination of sexuality and love] very important because they otherwise can’t have sex in ways they like it, but there are also others who just do not care so much. The boy apparently does not feel a need to further elaborate his view. Neither does anyone else in the class because silence, again, follows Miranda’s words. Trudy, after a while, decides to no longer wait for input from the class. She asks: “Do you guys actually know how the cycle of sexual arousal works?” Silence. Most pupils are just staring at either Trudy or the blackboard. TRUDY:  “You know, I mean, what happens [during sexual arousal]?”   Silence.

24  Jelle O. Wiering TRUDY:  “Hmm,

ok. If I hint that it is comparable to a diesel car and a car driving on petrol?”   Silence. Trudy then begins to draw on the blackboard. She draws a graph depicting two lines. One line, the one that represents the petrol car, accelerates rapidly to, immediately after having reached its maximum, return to its minimum. The diesel line, though, increases rather slowly and, also after having reached its maximum, it decreases rather slowly, too. Trudy then points to her graph again, touching the blackboard where the petrol car line reaches its maximum whilst the diesel line does not yet. She says: “You see, a man gets sexually aroused rather quickly, and after that he is finished permanently [is hij definitief klaar]. For a girl, it simply takes longer, and that’s why [for girls] sex frequently hurts.” MIRANDA NODS AND ADDS:  “You see, that’s why we always tend to say: pain should not be part of the game! [pijn hoort er niet bij]” This chapter investigates understandings of the body in the Dutch field of sexual health. This field is the setting where I conducted 13 months of anthropological fieldwork between 2016 and 2018. The chapter sets out to excavate some of the field’s implicit assumptions of the body, and explores what these might tell us about the secular body (Hirschkind 2011). What sexual practices do sexual health organisations recommend people to conduct? How do sexual health professionals envision a healthy body? How are experiences of pleasure and pain interpreted and framed? How are such notions influenced by assumptions pertaining to axes of differences such as gender and sexuality? Guided by these questions, this chapter interrogates the body in the field of sexual health and seeks to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the embodied and material dimensions of the secular (Engelke 2015, 45). Before turning to these questions, though, I  first want to note that research on sexual health often departs from rather different research questions. Studies often examine which particular method proves most ‘effective’ in keeping students away from undesired sexual practices  – which method, for example, best prevents students from unintended pregnancies or STDs (Kirby and Laris 2009). Other studies explore how such methods should deal with different international contexts (Vanwesenbeeck et  al. 2016). Notwithstanding the importance of such research for people’s sexual health and pleasure, I  consider it also important to, in addition, examine, unravel, and critically analyse the assumptions undergirding sexuality education, and to remain receptive to the more concealed normative presumptions and understandings that (have come to) underpin these well-­intended educations (Rasmussen 2010, 2012; Roodsaz 2018). For example, the term ‘effective’ sometimes seems to presuppose the

Body in the Dutch field of sexual health 25 existence of a way of teaching about sexuality that, if properly adapted to different cultural contexts, is applicable all over the world (e.g. Braeken and Cardinal 2008; Vanwesenbeeck et al. 2016; Browes 2015). The term points toward an undergirding postulate of the existence of an indexing gauge that enables researchers to objectively assess (the implementation of) sexuality education curricula in various contexts, which I do not believe exists. In what follows, I elucidate my understanding of secularity and why I seek to explore the religious/secular tension in the Dutch field of sexual health. I  will present a selection of sociological and anthropological literature on the body, distinguishing two different lenses which I will employ in the subsequent sections. The first approach perceives the body pre-­eminently as the product of discursive social powers and scrutinises discourses that seek to curb bodies in particular forms. The second approach focuses on the notion of embodiment: the collection of experiences and sensibilities we come across as a consequence of us being corporal individuals (Maus 1950 [1934]). I alternately take up these lenses to investigate the body in the Dutch field of sexual health. I first describe some prevailing understandings of the body as articulated in the interviews that I held, which I will combine with my observations of the discursive field. Second, I turn to autoethnography, describing my experiences that were part of the participatory process of being (trained as) a sexuality educator. In conclusion, I discuss these findings and extrapolate my observations here to the discussion of the secular body.

Researching secularity In his 2003 book Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad urges scholars to further explore the sensibilities that are embedded in the concept of the secular. Tempting as this call might sound, though, it also is a rather challenging assignment, and this is reflected by the fact that since Asad’s call in 2003 not many ethnographies of the secular have actually been written. Scheer, Fadil, and Scherpelern Johansen (2019, 2) suggest that this might partly be the result of secularity being a concept that proves difficult to pin down. The nominalist rendering of secularity as the mere separation of church and state feels unsatisfying, but it is difficult to find an adequate alternative (Mahmood 2013). Like a “moving shadow” (Asad 2003, 16), secularity seems to be able to avoid any attempt of locating its boundaries. I consider Asad’s metaphor of secularity as a shadow to be a helpful one, as it accentuates an understanding of secularity and religion as co-­ constitutive, but also as overlapping (2003, 16). Additionally, this metaphor urges scholars to begin their inquiry from religion rather than from secularity itself, which emphasises that secularity, similar to a shadow, needs its counterpart to actually take a shape. Still, this abstract description feels unsatisfying, because it remains unclear when something exactly can be conceived of as secular. Therefore, I find it useful to draw on the work of

26  Jelle O. Wiering Charles Hirschkind, who previously took up this issue and wrote an explorative essay about what a secular body would look like. He writes: [My] analysis of the secular . . . directs us less toward a determinant set of embodied dispositions than to a distinct mode of power, one that mobilizes the productive tension between religious and secular to generate new practices through a process of internal self-­differentiation. (Hirschkind 2011, 643) Building on this insight from Hirschkind, I understand secularity to refer to a collection of practices that mobilise the religious/secular tension in order to differentiate the religious from the secular. So, seen from this view, secularity is about the production and distribution of templates of what religion refers to and why it supposedly is different from irreligious matters. One can even conceive of secularity as something that ‘happens’ via everyday practices. Various actors, religious or irreligious,2 try to identify religion and subsequently distribute imaginaries of what religion supposedly is (not). Seen in this light, studying secularity can be conducted from two different angles. On the one hand, one can explore how phenomena are categorised as religious or irreligious: one can study how the secular process of differentiation actually takes place (e.g. exploring things and bodies employed in the act of differentiating the irreligious from the religious). On the other hand, one can also explore the phenomena that are identified as religious or irreligious as a result of such acts of differentiation. One can investigate the outcomes of these acts. In this chapter, I will further build on this later take on secularity. Let me turn to my fieldwork to explain why I consider the understanding of secularity as a set of collective practices fruitful to gain a better understanding of secularity, but also to introduce an important emic understanding of religion in the light of which the rest of the chapter should be read. In my fieldwork among Dutch professionals working on the topic of sexual health, secularity came to light particularly via my interlocutors’ concept of neutrality. I interviewed 19 sex educators and spoke with many more on an informal level, and I learned that many of them thought they were upholding a morally neutral position in their profession. This boiled down to the conviction that they were refraining from partaking in morally loaded issues by sticking to ‘plain facts’. Although my interlocutors were careful not to be too explicit in their rejection of religion, implicitly they frequently met religion with suspicion or scorn. The suspicion mainly related to Islam, which many of my interlocutors took as a tricky religion that had a treacherous potential to transgress Dutch ‘generally agreed upon’ understandings of sexuality. The example stressed abundantly in this context was that of Islam and its supposed intolerance toward homosexuality. This presumed rejection of homosexuality was something that my interlocutors just could not accept. The

Body in the Dutch field of sexual health 27 scorn, however, was primarily geared toward Christianity, which was often perceived by my interlocutors as an anachronism. Many considered Christians to be (at least a little) outdated: as people who had not yet arrived at modernity because their religion had significantly hampered their progress. The best example of the field’s negative appreciation of religion was its actual implementation in all the sex education classes I attended. People’s ‘beliefs’ [‘geloven’] were discussed amidst undesirable topics such as STDs and abortion. This inclusion thus implicitly confines religion to the same corner as these topics and postulates and conveys a negative relationship between religion and sexuality. It reflects the field’s larger understanding of the relationship between religion and sexuality: it does not necessarily have to be problematic, but there most certainly is a potential for it to be. My interlocutors’ recuperative acts of distancing from both Islam and Christianity provide an example of how religion was important in the field. Arguably, the morally neutral identity promulgated by my interlocutors but also by the organisations they worked for, even needed this positioning towards religion, as it provided a scapegoat that they could use to distance themselves from. This distancing, then, served to confirm their supposedly moralistically neutral identity. During my fieldwork, I observed how this process of identification happened in the organisations’ day-­to-­day activities such as sexuality education classes. For example, during such lessons, a rather denigrating image of religion was often communicated (Schrijvers and Wiering 2018). Building on the notion of secularity as explained earlier, I seek to explore in this chapter which practices and notions of sexuality were advocated by my interlocutors as ‘proper’. Elsewhere, I have focused on the ways religion was problematised, marginalised, or ridiculed during my research, but here I  mainly set out to explore the practices and understandings of sexuality that were, implicitly and explicitly, foregrounded as supposedly superior alternatives (cf. Schrijvers and Wiering 2018). So, for example, when my informants identified the idea of having sex only after marriage as Christian, and ‘thus’ as a little outdated, I explored the notions that they proposed as an appropriate irreligious alternative. If the religious body was explained as either a little anachronist (Christianity) or as potentially ignoring the boundaries of neutral sexuality (Islam), how would my interlocutors then envision a secular body? In what follows, I seek to answer these questions, and I do so through exploring the secular body in the context of the Dutch field of sexual health from two different theoretical perspectives.

The social body and embodiment In ‘The Body and Social Theory’, Chris Shilling discusses why the body has long been absent in the discipline of sociology (1993, 24). The main reason, he asserts, is because the body was not considered to be a relevant topic for research from sociological perspectives. Emile Durkheim, for example, presumed a clear nature/society dualism and took sociology as the discipline

28  Jelle O. Wiering that had to stick to the latter. The natural, Durkheim maintained, was rather to be explained by disciplines that were more oriented toward the individual, such as psychology and biology. Durkheim suggested that sociology had to focus on structures of society, the presumed prerequisites for social order, functioning, and control (Shilling 1993). The individual body was conceived of as a passive container, which, at best, was capable of serving the much more important rational mind.3 Schilling writes that this disregard of the body in sociology began to evaporate in the 1980s, when a growing number of sociologists started to integrate the body into their work. The social constructivist position became popular, taken up by scholars who considered the body as the result of constructions, impairments, and even as complete products of the social (Shilling 1993, 70). Of course, also among these social constructivists, a variety of views could be found, particularly with regard to how much of a social product the body actually was (Vance 1989). Still, most authors mainly pled for scrutinising the field in which the body was situated, which was taken to have forged the body to its current appearance. Schools, for example, were no longer seen as places that simply educated the minds of children: they were understood as places that were monitoring and shaping the bodies of young people (Shilling 1993, 24). Many authors have studied the social-­constructiveness of the body since the 1980s (see Lock 1993 for an overview), and many of them build heavily on the earlier work of both sociologists and anthropologists. The work of the British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1970), for instance, has become very influential, as it emphasises the variety in body symbolism. Foucault, the final author that I want to refer to here, highlighted the role of power in shaping the body. Throughout history, discursive powers sought to mould people’s bodies through imposing various kinds of practices and acts. Foucault illustrated this by highlighting the state’s incitement to public display of citizens’ bodies for the sake of society’s health. This display provided the state with the opportunity to either punish or reward specific expressions of the body (Foucault 1976, 1979, 1984). The social should, however, not only be considered as influencing bodies’ appearance: it also influences how people experience the world around them. Explorations of the body can thus also depart from experiences of the body itself, including the various ways that bodies operate in and make sense of the world. Marcel Mauss, as early as 1934, discussed the notion of habitus, seeking to capture how acts of embodiment differ among different people and cultures. Of particular importance for the study of embodiment has been the work of the philosopher Merleau-­Ponty (1962, 1964), who highlighted the role of perception and how embodiment is key to how humans perceive the world. A focus on embodiment hence not only concerns specific practices that we conduct (unconsciously) as a consequence of being humans raised in a particular environment: it also determines how we perceive the world (see also Haraway 1991). Merleau-­Ponty suggested to explore these

Body in the Dutch field of sexual health 29 moments where people’s perceptions begin and how these perceptions are shaped and constituted by culture (Merleau-­Ponty 1962; Csordas 1990). Anthropologist Thomas Csordas further outlines how the notion of embodiment could be integrated into anthropology (idem). He proposed a methodological perspective of embodiment, which he illustrated by various examples from different fieldwork settings (Csordas 1990, 1993, 2011). Csordas writes: This approach to embodiment begins from the methodological postulate that the body is not an object to be studied in relation to culture, but it is to be considered as the subject of culture, or in other words as the existential ground of culture. (Csordas 1990, 5) I agree with Csordas that exploring such experiences might render innovative contributions to our understanding of cultures.

The social body: impressions of the Dutch field of sexual health As stated previously, I  researched the Dutch field of sexual health for a total of 13 months between 2016 and 2018. I approached this field as what Bourdieu refers to as a ‘social field’ (Bourdieu and Johnson 1993, 14) – a field constituted by all actors who voluntarily or professionally work on the topic of sexuality. Some of the organisations working on sexual health in my research were small and consisted of a few individuals only, but others were larger and had more than 20 employees. The field also featured 70 CHS (Community Health Services). These CHS, funded by the Dutch government, operate all over the Netherlands to improve the health of Dutch people in general. The umbrella notion of ‘health’ includes sexual health, and each CHS has several employees working on this topic. Such professionals set up activities such as consultation hours, where people come over to talk about sexual issues that bother them. During my fieldwork, CHS were also frequently providing sex education classes at high schools. Most of my interlocutors had a background either in medicine or in psychology.4 Hence, there was a disciplinary majority, which influenced the field’s contours and its approaches to sexuality. Illustratively, my interlocutors were frequently confused when I  told them about the anthropological methods that I was applying in my research. They did not think such research was objective, nor that it really could be considered scientific. Additionally, echoing the medical background of many of my interlocutors, the field had a particular focus on the notion of sexual health. This focus on health rather than, say, sexual pleasure, implied that most organisations were mainly concerned with the unhealthy.5 They focused on combatting phenomena they considered as threats to the sexual health of people.

30  Jelle O. Wiering Because I had not been trained in medicine or psychology, gaining access to the field was a challenge. For example, it took me a lot of effort to be able to partake in a sex educator training. During my first week of fieldwork, I had already found an organisation that was looking for medicine students to teach sex education classes at high schools. Aspiring medical students only had to participate in a one-­evening course, which is by far not as time-­consuming as the three-­day course that I was required to follow when I finally found an opportunity. Carrying medical knowledge was beneficial in this field, and to some extent it even functioned as a certificate that allowed one to teach sexuality education. The hegemony of medical discourses in this field of sexual health was also mentioned by Cor, a 45-­year-­old general practitioner and sexologist. During our interview, he problematised the predominance of medically oriented perspectives in the field of sexual health. He, like me, had visited the Soa AIDS world day, which is a large annual event where thousands of people from all over the world gather to present and discuss their research on HIV and sexuality. Cor, again like me, had pointed out that three out of the four keynote speakers were working for hospitals. Cor told me he thought a variety of disciplinary perspectives would be an important improvement for the field. Jody, a 30-­year-­old female sex educator whom I  met a couple of times over the course of my fieldwork, made a similar point. I  was telling her that I had heard that many CHS were decreasing their sexuality education classes as a consequence of funding cuts, when she suddenly interrupted me. She said: “Ah finally, well that’s a good thing!” Her comment took me by surprise. Upon seeing my, probably rather puzzled, face she said: “Yeah, those people are all trained in health care [‘gezondheidszorg’]. These are not the kind of people I want to teach about sex!” This statement, I realised later, corresponded with the critical comments about current forms of sexuality education that she had brought up earlier. Jody was convinced sex education had to pay much more attention to the positive sides of sex, including sexual pleasure and joy. Jody’s and Cor’s critical views regarding the current emphasis on sexual health framed as a psychological/medical issue were, however, quite exceptional in the field. Most people I spoke with did consider sexuality a topic that was best approached from medical and/or psychological perspectives. Most interlocutors also maintained that studies on sexuality preferably were quantitative: they needed to include large samples and experimental settings, which enabled them to produce ‘evidence’. The field’s medical/psychological bias also implied that knowledge deriving from these particular disciplines was valued more than other forms of knowledge. For example, someone who was very much recognised as a clear expert because of her vast medical and psychological knowledge was professor of psychology and sexology Ellen Laan. Laan, who was working at the Medical Centre in Amsterdam in 2017, has conducted a lot of innovative research on female sexuality and pleasure. Her name appeared frequently

Body in the Dutch field of sexual health 31 during my fieldwork, as many of my interlocutors were very fond of her innovative work. One evening, I attended one of her public lectures. Tickets were sold out rapidly, at the cost of 21 euro, which is rather high for such an event. Her presentation clearly indicated her great knowledge of the body and sexuality. Reflecting the biomedical discourse that her work is part of, there were many graphs, images, mentions of co-­authored publications, and many medical terms such as ‘Corpus spongiosum’ and ‘vagina bulbi’. During her lecture, Laan problematised many popular but incorrect assumptions about sexuality and the body. She also addressed many interesting natural features of the body. She stressed that a female body contains four times more testosterone than oestrogen; the clitoris is situated at a different place of the female body than many people think; the vagina is much less sensitive than the clitoris and for good reasons (i.e. a baby has to pass through); scientists have not yet figured out whether the fluid that is created as a consequence of female squirting contains urine, and so on and so forth. During the lecture, it was clear to me that many in the audience really appreciated Laan and her work. Laan’s focus on improving women’s (sex) life through articulating and highlighting features of the female body that have long been ignored, downplayed, or even denied was inspirational for many audience members. I think Laan’s presentation captures some main characteristics of the body in my research. The field privileges what is seen as the natural body over the alleged social body, taking for granted that there are clear differences between the two, and articulating the former as the most important. It privileges biological features over social ones, as they are presumed to be universally shared and hence more legit. The field cherishes large samples, experiments, samples, and generalisations, building on the assumption that most bodies in this world essentially work in the same way. Hence, we could stress that the field encourages individuals to be knowledgeable of their bodies’ natural features. People are stimulated to be able to separate ‘facts’ from social convictions, which also reflects an emancipatory endeavour that we also observed in Laan’s lecture. The female body too can enjoy sexuality, and one of the most important ways to combat the inequalities regarding male and female sexual pleasure is by providing biomedical knowledge to people on how the natural female body functions. Having described the field’s prevailing outline of the body, I  will now apply the second lens and turn to my own experiences as a sex educator.

Participant observation as a sex educator One of the main goals I set myself was to conduct participant observation as a sex educator. I had already learned at an early stage of my fieldwork that, for many organisations, teaching sex education was a quintessential

32  Jelle O. Wiering activity. Therefore, I  took the role of sex educator as one that was germane for gaining a better understanding of the field, but I also considered it interesting because it would enable me to familiarise myself with the more embodied dimensions of the field. I decided to write an autoethnography, which is the main source of information in this section. After a few months of conducting fieldwork, I was finally selected by a sexual health organisation for an interview for a voluntary position as a sexuality educator. Another few months later, I was accepted in their three-­ day training. This training proved quite intensive and we, the participants, had to do a lot of homework. The first day of training started off with a quiz, which featured all kinds of questions about sexuality: “Up until how many hours after sex can one take a morning-­after pill in an attempt to cancel fertilization?” “How many sperm cells enter the vagina after an ejaculation?” and so on. Upon seeing all those questions, I wondered out loud whether I would be the right person to provide the sex education classes, as I clearly did not know a lot about the biological body. My trainers then told me that this was not a problem at all, as they did not think it was my main task to convey information. After all, they said, students could just use Google to find the answer to whatever question they had whenever they liked. Rather, they told me, my aim was to let students think and to initiate a dialogue about sexuality. For day two and three of the training, we needed to prepare lessons that we then had to teach to our trainers and some high school pupils invited from a high school nearby. During one such short lesson that I had prepared, something striking happened. Somewhere in my response to a question posed by a student, I said “that [situation you just described] is fucking annoying”. Immediately after I had said those words, I noticed that my trainers disapproved of it as both of them looked away quickly. After the training, on my way back home, I realised that it actually had been an important moment because it had illustrated to me clearly that sex educators were expected not to swear. This is not very spectacular news in itself, but it was important because it made me realise that, in my upcoming lessons, I could encounter more situations where I would engage in (supposedly) inappropriate forms of behaviour – moments when others, for example my trainers, would criticise me for some reason. Or perhaps when I  thought I  was failing to do my voluntary job properly. Those occasions would shed light on what an improper, and hence a proper, sexuality educator would look like from my own point of view. When I consequently began to investigate my own (supposed) mistakes with more care, including the general reflections I had during the sexuality education classes I  taught, I  noted that I  frequently experienced teaching about sexuality as frightening. For example, during the aforementioned lesson that was part of my training, I worried about my audience’s discipline. Since my class only consisted of six high school students and my two trainers, I had anticipated that my trainers would act as two rather rebellious

Body in the Dutch field of sexual health 33 pupils, compensating for the rather small total number of students in class. It turned out, however, that I had been wrong: both of my trainers turned out to be acting as very shy and very quiet students. Afterwards, my trainers told me that they had agreed on this beforehand. One of them then explained to me: Jelle, you are quite large [groot]. And when you enter a class and speak with that loud voice of yours, you might scare some. You also cross your arms all the time and that has a rather distancing, perhaps even challenging effect. That’s what we wanted to point out to you today. That you might want to be a bit less present, you know, less overwhelming. Later, one of them elaborated and said: “After a while they will notice you are a nice guy, but this does not seem to be the case at first.” From that moment on, I always tried to remind myself not to cross my arms all the time and to have an approachable attitude. This clearly is a first example of me incorporating a particular form of embodiment due to expectations from the field. My fear of not being able to discipline the class proved to be a realistic concern, as there often were students who sought to challenge me. Interestingly, to increase the odds of successfully disciplining my class, I noted that I always tried to gain some authority through subtle acts of bragging. I, for example, always began my lessons by mentioning that I worked for the University of Groningen, hoping that the pupils would think I was intelligent and hence worthy of attention. I  always wore my glasses, not only to be able to better see everyone in class, but also to look a bit more intellectual. These acts already indicate that I, apparently, was convinced that the issue of authority was closely related to having enough knowledge. In fact, not mastering enough knowledge of sexuality and the body was another frequent cause for anxiety. I was worried that students would ask questions about a topic I didn’t know enough about, such as the effects of the birth control pill on a girl’s body. My fear for this was catalysed by the fact that every sexuality education class I taught was also attended by one of the students’ regular teachers. The organisation I volunteered for required schools to let a regular teacher be present during the sex education, because I, like many other volunteers, did not have an official teaching qualification. Without those regular teachers also attending my lesson, it would have been easier to bluff my way out of situations. Or, I could more easily have admitted that I  just did not know the answer to the challenging question posed. With this regular teacher also attending, I felt a certain responsibility to be a knowledgeable teacher: after all, I  often thought, that was why the school had hired my organisation to provide a lesson! This fear to not be able to live up to my audience’s expectations was even further incited when I learned that the organisation I volunteered

34  Jelle O. Wiering at always requested the attending regular teachers to write a brief evaluation of the sexuality education afterwards. And, finally, since my lessons were frequently integrated in a school’s biology curriculum, many of the regular teachers attending my lessons happened to be experts in the field of biology, which even further catalysed my worries of being an incapable teacher. Sometimes, a student posed a question which I subtly had pretended to know the answer to, but which in reality I did not know. These were exactly the kind of scenarios I  was very anxious of, as during such moments it became painfully clear to the regular teacher and the students that I was not as knowledgeable as I  had pretended to be. In conclusion of this section, let me present such a situation. The lesson was near its end, when a pupil suddenly brought up the topic of abortion. Earlier we had spoken about this, and I  had provided a lot of information in this regard. Back then, I had already noted that there still were some comments, but since they were about an issue that I did not know much about, I strategically had dodged these comments. Now that the lesson was almost over, I unsuccessfully tried to call it a day: ME:  “Are there any questions left?” STUDENT IN THE BACK:  “Yeah, I have

a question, how do they happen to do an abortion when the child is in the belly already for 22 weeks? How does that work?” MY THOUGHTS:6  That’s a good question . . . I have some ideas as to how they do this. But am I sure? No, not really. And damn, a couple of minutes ago I had already been wrong in suggesting that nappies would cost approximately 200 euros per month.7 And now this. What to do. What if I just bluff and tell her that I think they use a kind of vacuum cleaner? I think they probably first cut the embryo into pieces, but I cannot really tell that, can I? These are kids! And the other pupils did not ask for this image, so I should not impose this information on them, should I? By the way, it’s a Christian school, so I also do not think the teacher is likely to appreciate it if I tell them that. . . . Let’s just tell them I do not want to go into this because there might be other pupils who might not want to hear this. MY ANSWER TO THE PUPIL:  “That’s an interesting question, but I do not really want to go into that. That’s because it is a rather sensitive question, and I think everyone should make up their own mind about whether they want to know this or not. Do you understand?” MY THOUGHTS:  Damn, I  sweat. I  need to spray some deodorant. I  hope the teacher is fine with my answer. This was tricky. First thing I will do when I get home is sort this out. I think this fragment provides a representative account of my alleged failures as a sex educator, but also what these tell about the disciplining force of

Body in the Dutch field of sexual health 35 the field I studied. It shows how I, somewhat desperately, tried to safeguard my knowledgeable status, and thus an important part of my authoritative status (in my view), by again (!) dodging a question I was not able to answer. I tried to conceal my lack of knowledge by responding in a way that rendered me an escape route, bluffing that I could provide the answer but that there were different reasons to not do so. The fragment illustrates how my conceptions of authority strongly related to the mastering of biomedical knowledge about the (interference on the) body.

The secular body in the field of sexual health My two explorations of the body in the field of sexual health both suggest that biomedical knowledge of the body is valued in this context. For example, if we would constitute an ‘ideal body’ on the grounds of my observations regarding the first, more explicitly discursive, field of sexual health, we could argue that that body has to be healthy. Or, a bit more precisely: that it should not be unhealthy, which implies that it would carry sufficient medical knowledge to avoid unhealthy sexual behaviour. But that body would, in addition, avoid pain during sex because, after all, pain should not be part of the game. Therefore, we could submit that that body would be capable of deciding for itself whether to participate in practices prescribed by social expectations or not. It has moved beyond non-­biological convictions, and it is well aware that men do not have natural characteristics that somehow legitimate a privileged position during sex. It knows how it functions ‘naturally’, and it knows where every part, including the Corpus Spongiosum, is located so that it can fully enjoy sex. I find it more complicated to conceptualise an ideal body on the basis of my own experiences as a sexuality educator, and I am the first to admit that this ideal body is strongly influenced by axes of differences such as gender and class. I am, for example, totally convinced that my behaviour as a bluffing and purportedly self-­confident sex educator also draws on conceptions of masculinity, which I (apparently) aim to live up to. However, for the purposes of this chapter – exploring the secular body in the Dutch field of sexual health – a focus on gender (or class) does not seem to be the most relevant to me, though others might prove me wrong. My alleged failures suggest that this ideal body does not have worries or feelings of anxiety, simply because it is knowledgeable about the natural features of the body. Apparently, from my own point of view, the ideal sex educator does not fear challenging questions from students for the simple reason that they can easily provide the answers. Most of my interlocutors would indeed agree with the idea that sex education attempts to incline students to become more knowledgeable about the biological functioning of their body, and particularly the female body. I realise this is a circular argument – I am exploring a social field to find the body that is implicitly recommended only to argue that that kind of body is

36  Jelle O. Wiering advocated – but my point in doing so is to again accentuate the homogeneity of the views in the field. Jody, for example, often calls for more attention to female sexual pleasure by showing and elaborating on a model of the clitoris in her sexuality education classes. The introductive vignette in this chapter illustrates how Miranda and Trudy explained how the male and female body function differently, encouraging students to adapt their sexual practices to this knowledge. Importantly, as we have seen, this idea of improving people’s sexual health by providing them with biomedical knowledge of the body strongly draws on the assumption that the social can be distinguished from the natural. Students are taught that the sexual arousal system works in pre-­ social, universal ways (‘natural’), which often diverge from how it is depicted in, for example, films (‘social’). The social is often portrayed as a scapegoat that distracts people’s understanding of sex away from the unmediated forms of sex that nature initially had designed for them. The idea of a universal, pre-­social body that is out there, waiting to be unraveled through supposedly factual biomedical research, was mobilised again and again. This enshrinement of the natural aims to categorise any social or divine influence as a false distraction; in supposed contrast to religious takes on the body and sexuality, these irreligious perceptions bear a factual veracity. Joan Scott describes how in 17th-­century Europe already quite similar arguments about natural features were mobilised – again, nature, and not a god or the social, as the ultimate intelligent designer – to legitimise women’s exclusion from active citizenship. Through accentuating the qualities that followed from the incontestable biology of sex, men were enabled to consign women to the private sphere (Scott 2013, 28). Scott’s work – among the work of many other scholars, of course – illustrates that notions of the natural, including its supposed universal sexual differences, is always subject to social perceptions (Butler 1990). Hence, the clear separation between the natural and social that the field assumes but also seeks to inculcate is tricky and potentially problematic. This suggests that the proposed superior irreligious alternative to (alleged) religious authority is perhaps not as superior as promulgated. But let us now turn to my observations regarding the relation of authority and knowledgeability. I am convinced that my interlocutors will not agree with the suggestion that the authority of a sex educator largely depends on her or his biomedical knowledge. Rather, most of them, much like my trainers in the sex educator training, would assert that it is perfectly fine for a sex educator to stress that she or he does not know the answer to a question. From their point of view, a proper sex educator is not one who is capable of answering all questions, but one who manages to incline students to (1) contemplate sexuality and (2) communicate about it. However, as the example of Ellen Laan illustrates, having a lot of biomedical knowledge  – preferably employed in combination with pursuing

Body in the Dutch field of sexual health 37 emancipatory endeavours – does bear the potential of gaining more status in the field. Of course, this is another setting than the classroom, but there are commonalities. Students of medicine are considered better equipped to teach sex education and are more easily accepted in sex educator trainings. The students in my lessons, the attending regular teachers, but also myself, thought that I, as a sex educator, should have a considerable amount of knowledge about the biological body. Many of my own (alleged) failures as a sex educator were moments where I noted that I, unfortunately, could not live up to these expectations. My trainers’ suggestion that being a sex educator is not so much about having knowledge of the biomedical body not only contradicts with my own experiences, but it also appears to be at odds with other expectations I encountered in the field. These analyses suggest that a sex educator faces two different criteria that may contradict each other. On the one hand, he or she is told to act softly and authentically. There is no need to bluff because not having a lot of biomedical knowledge is not so much of a problem. On the other hand, my interlocutors’ respect and admiration for professor Laan, but also my own feelings as a sex educator, illustrate that mastering biomedical knowledge – but also to just pretend to have it – can sometimes provide one with status and authority. To explain these contradictive trajectories, I  consider Sharon Lamb’s work on sex education in the US insightful. Lamb (2013) describes how, in the US, the enshrinement of biomedical facts in sex education can be traced down to the historical struggle between proponents of CSE (Comprehensive Sex Education) versus advocates of AO (Abstinence Only) education. Put concisely, AO education refers to methods that highlight abstinence as the only morally correct path. This approach, Lamb suggests, is often associated with tradition, backwardness, and conservative religion-­infused public politics. CSE, purportedly in contrast to AO, stands for a broader discussion of sexuality. Lamb argues that, in the US, proponents of CSE currently have the better cards in this struggle, as the CSE approach is promulgated to be grounded in scientific research. However, she suggests that more recently, CSE’s allegiance with science has also hampered a further developing of the approach, as its self-­imposed requirement to be grounded in scientific evidence significantly limits the curriculum’s selection of topics. Lamb suggests that it has proved difficult, for example, to integrate sexual pleasure in CSE, as a call for a focus on pleasure is considered as an act of moral positioning. This is believed to problematise the supposedly objective scientific perspectives. Consequently, in the US, CSE has gained what Lamb denotes as a ‘medical voice’. It often limits itself to presenting medical ‘facts’ because, within the embraced discourse of science, any personal experience is rendered illegitimate (Lamb 2013, 450). Though there is not much open support for AO education in the Netherlands, and such a struggle is thus not taking place at a similar level in

38  Jelle O. Wiering this country, it appears to me that the paradox I have sketched earlier can be partly explained by a similar increase in dissatisfaction with the medical voice in sex education. After all, the obvious point of Jody and Laan’s accentuation of facts about female sexuality is to pursue an emancipatory goal of gaining more gender equality regarding sexual pleasure. The fact that my trainers did not mind my lack of knowledge about the biological body suggests that they considered the act of initiating and moderating dialogues the most important feature of a sex educator. These are assumptions that, arguably, move beyond a medical voice. But Lamb’s account also explains why many non-­professionals such as the students in my classes, the attending regular teachers, and myself expected a biomedical focus: the medical voice, historically, has been the most important for constituting sex education. These different takes on what constitutes a good sex educator can perhaps also shed light on what a secular body in this context looks like. I realise I should be cautious here, as the criteria that I outlined are obviously not only about a particular negotiation with religion. One might thus question my suggestion that the upcoming features really concern a delineation between religious and irreligious stances. Perhaps they are geared against any anti-­scientific view and not necessarily against what my interlocutors consider as religious notions. In other words, I do not want to suggest that the upcoming characteristics are solely embraced in the field because of their assumed opposition to religious ones. Yet, since my focus in this chapter is on the secular body, I still discuss these in this light. My examination of the secular body in the field of sexual health shows there are two important secular premises  – again, secular in the sense of being perceived as different from, among other things, religion – that can be lived up to independently but that prove difficult to bring together. In the field of sexual health, the ideal secular body, in supposed contrast to a constrained religious body, is free to pursue its own preferences and to make its own choices. At the same time, though, the secular body is expected, also in supposed contrast to religion, to be knowledgeable of its factual ‘natural’ capabilities and to stick to, supposedly objective, biological conceptualisations of the body. Both the perception of the secular body as being empowered to make its own choices and its understanding as having knowledge about objective biological facts appear more attractive than their suggested religious counterparts: being constrained and having no knowledge of objective facts. However, when we try to bring both secular promises together, we note that this is difficult: what to make of an individual who chooses to ignore that a girl’s body works like a diesel car? What would have happened if I had chosen to integrate in my lessons a visually detailed scientific image of how an abortion was performed, so that students were better equipped to make an informed decision when the time might come? On those occasions, the promise of creating individuals who can choose their own ways of engaging

Body in the Dutch field of sexual health 39 in sex conflicts with the idea of an objective stance. Sex education, of course, only presents a biased selection of scientific features of the biomedical body; a selection that often corroborates particular moral, often emancipatory, aims, which perhaps even disables some individuals to follow their own preferences. A man who takes into account that a woman might need some more time to become sexually aroused does not necessarily pursue his own preferences. The secular body, I  believe my analysis suggests, cannot live up to its own promises, as it seeks to place under one heading features that individually may appear to overcome stereotypical religious notions but that, taken together, prove contradictory. It is for this reason, I think, that the secular body is often evoked as an unexamined, uncriticised alternative that, like a shadow, is out there somewhere to provide a better alternative to the closely interrogated and often criticised religious body.

Conclusion This chapter investigated the secular body in the Dutch field of sexual health. The chapter explored this body from two different angles, first examining the discursive field this body is situated in and constituted by. This illustrates how the field privileges what is seen as natural body over the alleged social body, taking for granted that there are clear differences between the two and articulating the former as the most important. My second exploration examined my experiences as a sex educator and highlighted how I considered my authoritative status to be related to my knowledge of the biomedical body, something that my trainers did not agree with. Taking these different stances into account, I  suggest that a sex educator faces two different expectations that may contradict each other. On the one hand, they are told to act subdued and honest, not caring about their lack of biomedical knowledge about the body. On the other hand, mastering biomedical knowledge of the body  – but also to just pretend to have it – can actually provide one with status and authority. Both encountered perceptions of the body as empowered to make its own choices, and its understanding as bearing knowledge about objective biological facts are denoted as neutral, and thus as different from, among other things, religious ones. However, when one tries to bring both secular promises together, it turns out that these are sometimes contradictory. The promise of creating individuals that can choose their own ways of engaging in sex eventually conflicts with the idea of an amoral stance. Hence, I  suggest that my exploration of the secular body in sex education illustrates how it cannot live up to its own promises, as it seeks to place under one heading features that, individually, may appear to overcome stereotypical religious notions, but taken together prove incompatible. It is for this reason, I suggest, that the secular body appears much more frequently as an unexamined, uncriticised alternative that is out there somewhere to

40  Jelle O. Wiering be articulated as a superior replacement for the much more often discussed religious body.

Notes 1 Some parts of this chapter are taken from Wiering’s forthcoming dissertation (Wiering 2020). 2 Importantly, the term irreligious here should not be conflated with Lois Lee’s notion of ‘non-­religion’, which she has coined to refer to positions that are explicitly geared against religion (Lee 2014; Binder 2017). 3 I agree with Turner that the work of Weber on the Protestant ethic is an important exception here, as it does in fact explore the relationship between the body and modernity (see Turner 1992). 4 I do not want to suggest here that the disciplines of medicine and psychology are equivalent, but there are of course many communalities. Terms such as ‘evidence’, ‘experiments’, and ‘samples’ all were rather unfamiliar to me as an anthropologist, but they were frequently employed by my interlocutors, be they psychologists, sexologists, or general practitioners. 5 This is not the place to extensively discuss the differences between sexual health and sexual wellbeing. I do, however, want to note that I think the understanding of sexual health as employed by my interlocutors is too narrow, as it seems to neglect the fact that many factors that are considered as not directly relating to sex might very well influence one’s sexual health, too. This could concern spirituality, a body’s appearance, a person’s general happiness, and so on. I agree with Rachel Spronk (2014) that using the term sexual wellbeing can help to take such issues more seriously. 6 During the lessons, I frequently wrote down key words related to what I thought and what I felt during the lessons. Immediately after a lesson, I would sit down and try to recall my thoughts more precisely and write them down. 7 The teacher had laughed loudly upon hearing that, and she had provided a more realistic calculation in front of the class, which showed that I  clearly had been wrong.

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Body in the Dutch field of sexual health 41 Csordas, Thomas J. 2011. “Cultural Phenomenology: Embodiment: Agency, Sexual Difference, and Illness.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of the Body and Embodiment, edited by F. E. Mascia-­Lees, 137−157. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Engelke, Matthew. 2015. “The Coffin Question: Death and Materiality in Humanist Funerals.” Material Religion 11 (1): 26–48. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 1990 [1976]. The History of Sexuality. Vol. I: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Reprint, New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 1990 [1984]. The History of Sexuality, Vol. II. Translated by Robert Hurley. Reprint, New York: Vintage. Haraway, Donna J. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books. Hirschkind, Charles. 2011. “Is There a Secular Body?” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 633–647. Kirby, Douglas, and Laris, Ba A. 2009. “Effective Curriculum-Based Sex and STD/ HIV Education Programs for Adolescents.” Child Development Perspectives 3 (1): 21–29. Lamb, Sharon. 2013. “Just the Facts? The Separation of Sex Education From Moral Education.” Educational Theory 63 (5): 443–460. Lee, Lois. 2014. “Secular or Nonreligious? Investigating and Interpreting Generic ‘Not Religious’ Categories and Populations.” Religion 44 (3): 466–482. Lock, Margaret. 1993. “Cultivating the Body: Anthropology and Epistemologies of Bodily Practice and Knowledge.” Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1): 133–155. Mahmood, Saba. 2013. “Sex and Secularism.” In Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference, edited by Linell E. Cady and Tracy Fessenden, 47–58. New York: Columbia University Press Mauss, Marcel. 1950. Les Techniques du Corps. In Sociologie et Anthropologie. Paris: Presses Universitares de France. Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Edited by James Edie, translated by William Cobb. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Rasmussen, Mary Lou. 2010. “Secularism, Religion and ‘progressive’ Sex Education.” Sexualities 13 (6): 699–712. Rasmussen, Mary Lou. 2012. “Pleasure/Desire, Sexularism and Sexuality Education.” Sex Education 12 (4): 469–481. Roodsaz, Rahil. 2018. “Probing the Politics of Comprehensive Sexuality Education: ‘Universality’ Versus ‘Cultural Sensitivity’: A Dutch – Bangladeshi Collaboration on Adolescent Sexuality Education. Sex Education 18 (1): 107–121. Scheer, Monique, Nadia Fadil, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen. 2019. Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Schrijvers, Lieke L., and Jelle Wiering. 2018. “Religious/secular Discourses and Practices of Good Sex.” Culture and Religion 19 (2): 139–159. Scott, Joan W. 2013. “Secularism and Gender Equality.” In Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference, edited by Linell E. Cady and Tracy Fessenden, 25–46. New York: Columbia University Press.

42  Jelle O. Wiering Shilling, Chris. 2012 [1993]. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage. Spronk, Rachel. 2014. “Sexuality and Subjectivity: Erotic Practices and the Question of Bodily Sensations.” Social Anthropology 22 (1): 3–21. Turner, Bryan S. 1992. Max Weber: From History to Modernity. London: Routledge. Vance, Carole S. 1991. “Anthropology rediscovers sexuality: A theoretical comment.” Social Science & Medicine 33 (8): 875–884. Vanwesenbeeck, Ine, Judith Westeneng, Thilly de Boer, Jo Reinders, and Ruth van Zorge. 2016. “Lessons Learned from a Decade Implementing Comprehensive Sexuality Education in Resource Poor Settings: ‘The World Starts With Me.’ ” Sex Education 16 (5): 471–486. Wiering, Jelle O. 2020. “Secular Practices: the Production of Religion in the Dutch Field of Sexual Health. PhD Dissertation Groningen: University of Groningen.

2 SRHR, the liberated body, and the primacy of conscience Probing beyond the secular/ religious binary An Van Raemdonck Introduction In this chapter I review discourses on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) through a lens that critically interrogates the religious/secular binary. With this aim in mind, I selectively review the development of SRHR concepts and major controversies that have been articulated along religious/secular fault lines. Institutionalised religious voices and religious actors within civil society have opposed these concepts since their initial formulation at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICDP), held in Cairo in 1994. Today, women’s reproductive rights – and gender and sexuality issues in general – have only become more visible as a major bone of contention between institutionalised religious actors on the one hand and women’s rights activist groups on the other. Over the past years, opposition increased against women’s access to abortion services, contraception, and sexual education. Such resistance has been expressed in popular street protests across the globe. Feminists deplore this new power balance in which institutionalised religion has (re)gained authority over women’s bodies, personal, reproductive choices and sexual practices. Whereas academic scholarship has been engaged to understand the intricate junctions between religious (particularly Christian) authorities, evolving religious (Christian) doctrine and state politics in different national contexts (e.g. Bracke and Paternotte 2016; Case 2016; Köttig, Bitzan, and Péto 2017; Mishtal 2015), the public debate easily reveals reassertions of a divide between a conservative religious front versus secular progressives. This chapter examines discursive engagements with SRHR, with a focus on the role of the body and bodily transformation and with the aim to destabilise the belief in a religious/secular binary structuring and determining opponents and supporters of SRHR. In a first section, I selectively review literature on sexuality and SRHR in a postcolonial context. This literature demonstrates a turn toward the recognition of embodied knowledge and agency, and emphasises positive aspects of sexuality as pleasure and enjoyment. In the second section, I discuss the enfolding of discourses on SRHR among Christian, particularly Roman Catholic, institutionalised

44  An Van Raemdonck and non-­institutionalised voices. I focus on the role of the Vatican and its political interventions on the international level on the one hand and a civil society group, Catholics for Choice (CFC), that defends sexual and reproductive rights on the other. I then juxtapose different underlying theoretical understandings of the body and contrast the Vatican’s naturalistic body with activists’ liberated, transformed body and finally, with CFC’s ‘primacy of the conscience’. The third and final section of the chapter critically engages with the notion of ‘strategic secularism’ that has been invoked by sociologist Juan Marco Vaggione to capture the ambiguous nature of religious groups’ responses to SRHR. I propose to use its mirror-­concept, ‘strategic religiosity’, to illuminate the processes through which progressive gender and sexuality politics become naturalised as secular.

Pleasure and danger in the postcolonial context: SRHR, embodied knowledge, and agency In this section, I focus particularly on the role of the body, bodily liberation, and transformation in literature on gender, sexuality, and development in postcolonial contexts. Much has been said about the overwhelming focus on danger, risk, and illness in Western writings and interventions concerning non-­Western sexualities. Anthropologist Signe Arnfred is one among many voices concerned with revealing colonial continuities in current representations of African sexualities (Arnfred 2005). The long-­term Western fascination and political interest in non-­Western sexuality brought about many ‘tales’ in contrast to the predominant African feminist ‘silence’ on topics of gender and sexuality. Relying on gender studies scholar Amina Mama, Arnfred brings to the fore the amplitude of Western tales on African sexuality in contrast to a remarkable African silence, suggesting that the latter may be an indirect reaction to the West’s persistent preoccupation (Arnfred 2005, 59). She weaves together colonial and imperialist representations of African sexuality with current donor-­driven development interests and scholarly agendas. Issues of sexuality have been mostly conceptualised in terms of illness, violence, and death and often either victimise or blame women. Rarely has female desire, sexual pleasure, and enjoyment been considered by social scientists or by the development sector in a manner that engages with local understandings of sexual scripts, subjectivities, and moralities (Pigg and Adams 2005). Similarly, in relation to discussions of SRHR, the problems, dangers, risks, and violence have usually taken centre stage. Women construct a “political economy of the body” (Petchesky 2001) in their reproductive and sexual health negotiations, which is “often at a cost to their bodies and health”, argues anthropologist Sabina Rashid (Rashid 2008, 158). Rashid studied the sexual and reproductive lives of poor Bangladeshi women by focussing on larger social, economic, and political structures in which women act and make their choices. In this context and for these women,

SRHR, liberated body, primacy of conscience 45 sexual and reproductive behaviour means “something to forfeit in exchange for tenuous rights to security; they mean a short-­lived power  – mediated by men – over other equally poor but older women” (Rashid 2008, 158). While Rashid takes a critical anthropological approach to the ways in which women negotiate sexual behaviour and transactions, the dangerous and oppressive dimensions are highlighted. Carole Vance’s seminal work Pleasure and Danger (1984) positioned female sexuality between structures of oppression, risk, and danger and personal agency and experiences of joy and pleasure (Vance 1984). Following Vance, the critique that sexual risk and danger are prioritised over other, positive dimensions of sexual experiences and discourse has been articulated by many scholars (e.g. Groes-­Green 2009; Jolly, Cornwall, and Hawkins 2013; McFadden 2003; Undie 2013). Instead of focusing on danger and risk, feminists and social scientists have argued to consider pleasure as an important vantage point to study sexual and reproductive health and personal wellbeing. When female sexuality is kept in a sphere of danger, disease, and violence, this leads to a narrow discursive and embodied space that precludes the exploration of other, positive dimensions. Moreover, it may lead to a reinforcement of dominant social conceptions of gender and sexuality. African feminist sociologist Patricia McFadden, for instance, argues that “hegemonic notions of sexual behaviour and heterosexist expectations” have shaped responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis, “while reinforcing the deeply embedded cultural taboos and claims that define sexual pleasure and freedom as ‘dangerous’ and ‘irresponsible’ ” (McFadden 2003, 1). She argues furthermore that the reinforcement of these notions contributed to a rapid spread of the disease among women (McFadden 2003, 1). Indeed, interventions of international development in the Global South may, sometimes unwittingly, reproduce and reinforce dominant male-­ centred notions. In a similar vein, women’s rights and anti-­prostitution laws have been appropriated in South Korea in ways that reinforce ideas of gender-­conservative cultural authenticity and circumscribe womanhood within narrow nationalist frames (Cheng 2011). In Egypt, the vernacularisation of campaigns against female genital cutting have equally reinforced male-­centred normative notions of gender and sexuality and reproduced representations of women as victims while at the same time being responsible for negative sexuality (Van Raemdonck 2018). When discourse on sexuality is overwhelmingly cast in terms of dominant moralities, the space to discuss actual sexual practices, women’s lived experiences, and embodied knowledge is narrowed. Similarly, feminist scholar Chi-­ Chi Undie argued in the context of sub-­Saharan Africa to acknowledge the importance of “sexuality and sexual well-­being – even when working on sexual violence” (Undie 2013, 185). Victims of violence particularly have a need to talk about sexuality and sexual wellbeing, she argues, in order to be able to continue life and not to be defined by the negative sexual experiences.

46  An Van Raemdonck These scholars aim to theoretically advance the importance of a focus on sexual and bodily pleasure and actual sexual practices. Gender scholar Bibi Bakare-­Yusuf echoes Vance when stating that “the assertion of women’s sexual and embodied agency is potentially more threatening and disruptive to a hetero-­patriarchal controlling logic than a focus on danger and violation” (Bakare-­Yusuf 2013, 29). Drawing attention to the problems of sexual violence and danger remains important, but at the same time it allows for the continuation of perceptions of women as passive recipients of “hetero-­ masculine prerogatives and therefore in need of protection from normative erotic violence” (Bakare-­Yusuf 2013, 29). A final aspect related to sexual behaviour, reproductive rights, and body politics in a postcolonial context is the great importance of continued international power differences and inequalities. Global economic and political inequalities continue to contribute to tensions between the universality of rights and the particularities of local contexts, histories, and politics. Anthropologist Richard Shweder states that most anthropologists have difficulty to embrace simplistic moral universalism, although “since the advent of global feminism and the international human rights movement, the scene within the discipline of anthropology has become more complex”, as he puts it laconically (Shweder 2012, 88). Examples of how interventions in the field of rights – particularly women’s rights or SRHR – meet with some form of local resistance are manifold. The resistance by the state of Uganda against sexual and LGBT rights may be the most pronounced illustration of the entanglement of international development aid promoting sexual rights and politicised resistance that is articulated through antigay positions (Lange and Tvedten 2016).1 This case highlights the entanglement of race, colonialism, and reproduction in the imperial/colonial era, and its contemporary translations in the concern with population management and normative international gender and sexuality politics. This may provoke or contribute to local resistances to SRHR as sexual topics become highly politicised and claims against them become framed as nationalist-­protectionist, rather than religiously inspired.

Institutionalised religion’s opposition to SRHR: safeguarding ‘pelvic orthodoxy’ In the following sections, I  discuss Christian institutionalised and non-­ institutionalised religious discourse on SRHR, while keeping a focus on views of the body and bodily transformation. Through this discussion I aim to destabilise the oft-­employed dichotomy between progressive secular versus conservative religious viewpoints on SRHR. I will give most attention to Christianity and particularly Roman Catholicism because the Holy See has been playing a crucial role in forming international and cross-­religious alliances in opposition to proposals for SRHR. The Holy See’s attitude in the preparation of the 1994 International Conference on Population and

SRHR, liberated body, primacy of conscience 47 Development (ICPD) in Cairo and in its aftermath at the ICPD+5 summits has been widely remarked upon. The Holy See represents Vatican City state and the global Catholic church. Having the status of non-­member permanent observer at the UN, the Vatican was still able to greatly influence decision-­making via lobbying and by forming alliances with conservative Islamic states. The Cairo Programme of Action, resulting from the ICPD conference, established the terminology of reproductive health, after a consensus was reached to drop references to sex and sexuality. In the following years, however, reproductive health kept being criticised by gender-­ conservative actors as a concept that promotes premarital – adolescent – or extramarital sexual interactions, abortion or contraceptive means, and reproductive choice. Abortion and homosexuality are often constructed as the most urgent and visible forms of an encroaching international agenda of gender and sexual equality (Vaggione 2005, 241). According to development studies scholar David Hulme, opponents of reproductive health such as “the Holy See, a small number of conservative Islamic states and, later, conservative Christians and the Bush administration mixed their moral reasoning with judicious political manoeuvring” (Hulme 2009, 3). Conservative actors across religious denominations and political groups started collaborating to oppose feminist demands on gender and sexuality, unlikely as their partnering would seem. Such forms of ‘unholy’ or ‘uneasy’ alliance building between religious and political right-­wing groups has continued until today (Fassin 2014). Religious actors’ transnational collaboration also served as an illustration of the political transformations of contemporary public religion. These changes show a ‘reactive politicization’ of religious groups, as they form civil society networks to the example of feminist and gender equality groups (Vaggione 2005). This extraordinarily friendly meeting of representatives across different institutionalised religious groups was guided by a shared concern in safeguarding “pelvic orthodoxy”, as religious ethics scholar Daniel Maguire coined it (Maguire 2000, 188– 189). Women’s reproduction appeared as a non-­negotiable subject, but this focus on ‘pelvic issues’ needs to be contextualized, as history shows us different concerns of orthodoxy across time and place. Maguire calls it therefore a false orthodoxy. It is being created by current representatives of the Vatican and Muslim faith representatives who are interested in making it seem as a timeless and monolithic religious ‘orthodox’ claim. The alliance’s lobby work combined with transnational agencies and the role of political powers at that moment succeeded in keeping the term ‘reproductive health’ out of international development policy for the following five years after ICPD. The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) were formulated in 2000 and referred only to maternal and child health and no longer used the term ‘reproductive health’. The older and more established institution of ‘family planning’ was considered less controversial as the emphasis remained on the family, and male relatives were not considered as being excluded. The concept of reproductive health and rights, however,

48  An Van Raemdonck foregrounds women’s individual bodies, personal rights, and choices (Hulme 2009, 6). By the mid-­2000s, supporters of reproductive health managed to influence high-­level UN policymaking again in their favour, and the term started to reappear in UN documents and consequent MDG goal setting. Conservative-­ religious opposition to concepts of reproductive health is not homogenous. For the Holy See, abortion has taken central place, whereas for Islamic states, premarital sexual interaction has been of major concern (Hulme 2009, 13). For many Catholics, the fight against abortion and contraception has been based on a theology of “unrestricted defence of life at conception” (Peñas Defago and Morán Faúndes 2014, 84). This theological belief, however, should not be seen as ‘essentially Christian’, but has come to be dominant as a consequence of several factors, including historical clerical changes and responses to modernity (Maguire 2000). Christian theologians have pointed out that traditional Christian doctrine is not necessarily in conflict with the concepts of SRHR. Particularly, pro-­life doctrine has not been a constant and fixed position in Christian history. Moreover, Maguire asserts that there has been an “openness to choice on abortion and on contraception in the core of the tradition” (2000, 194). When examining Christian theological standpoints, one finds a pluralism of opinions among which opponents of abortion and pro-­life figure as one among many. The longest held position in the Roman Catholic Church is that of ‘delayed animation or ensoulment’. A continuation of classic Greek thought, this position holds that “the spiritual human soul did not arrive in the foetus until as late as three months into the pregnancy” (2000, 194). In the first three months, there was believed to be first a vegetative soul, then an animal soul, and only in the final phase of completion a human soul. He concludes that “the most traditional and stubbornly held position in Catholic Christianity is that early abortions are not murder” (2000, 195). It is therefore not Christian doctrine per se but rather the turn toward hierarchic absolutism and papal infallibilism that contributed to current rigid doctrinal positions. In the late 19th century, the Vatican turned to the current view that “the embryo is fully human from the moment of conception” (Radford Ruether 2008, 187) and disavowed contraception and abortion under any circumstances. Since then, the articulation of a ‘pelvic orthodoxy’ has become a defining focus of orthodoxy that reaches well beyond the premises of the Vatican and transnational and supranational summits. It has been regulating and inspiring global religious civil society activism as well.

‘Strategic secularism’ or ‘strategic religiosity’? Religious activism as ‘strategic secularism’ Since the 1970s, pro-­life activism and protests defending traditional family values developed on the basis of an unconditional defence of life at conception. Led by several major non-­governmental organisations (NGOs) based

SRHR, liberated body, primacy of conscience 49 in the USA and Europe, such as Human Life International, this protest became a movement with strong international presence. The doctrine of the protection of life from conception served as an anchor around which protest and activism against SRHR was organised. This activism mirrors feminist activism and supporters of gender and sexual equality in more than one way, argues sociologist Juan Marco Vaggione. Organisations deploy discourses and use certain methods that are reminiscent of secular women’s rights activism. Instead of using theological or moral framing, they take recourse to scientific and legal discourse when defending the idea of the natural family, a development that Vaggione called “strategic secularism” (2005, 242). In building their case, religious groups develop a sort of strategic secularism that is neither what secularization is supposed to be, a way to foster – more open discourses and negotiable positions – nor what it is not – the imposition of a religious doctrine. It is in that middle space of the secular/nonsecular that the empowerment of religion has been taking place. (Vaggione 2005, 242) Vaggione places religious groups’ activism in defence of the ‘natural family’ and against reproductive health and rights in what he sees as a kind of middle ground between secular and religious activity. He characterises such groups’ engagement with a secular sphere and logics as instrumental or strategic and as having moved away from position-­taking that is solely articulated through religious doctrine. He portrays this as “a switch from an active evangelization into a reactive politicization, as an appropriation and redeployment of secular strategies of political intervention” (Vaggione 2005, 245). Whether or not we agree with Vaggione’s understanding of what is intrinsically religious or secular, or what secularisation should be, his observations of the explicit activist and political nature of religious pro-­ life groups have been widely shared. Religious civil society activism has in turn fed back to institutionalised religion. Roman Catholic religious groups and networks promoting family values – based on the pro-­life dogma – have in their turn inspired the Holy See in terms of methods and strategies. There has occurred a general “shift away from doctrinal arguments towards the use of more secular rhetoric, using sophisticated technical evidence and strategic interpretations of international human rights standards” (Coates et al. 2014, 117). One significant illustration of this shift is the way in which the Holy See coupled the right to life, as articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to its own particular understanding of the moment of conception as the start of life that consequently has the right to be protected and saved (Coates et al. 2014, 119). In a similar vein, scientific reasoning and language have been mobilised to create support in the case against abortion. Pro-­life activists protesting

50  An Van Raemdonck outside of abortion clinics in England and Wales, for instance, claimed that the understanding of “the beginning of life” at the moment of conception has been theoretically endorsed by scientists (Lowe and Page 2018, 11). These activists aim to appeal to a secular audience and therefore try to rely on allegedly scientific facts. In this context, activists said to look for arguments that are more effective than religious ones. Such efforts lead to statements where “ ‘scientific facts’ are pushed in certain directions to make claims that scientists themselves would not routinely make” (Lowe and Page 2018, 11). Lowe and Page conclude that the anti-­abortion activists they studied relied on a mixture of both religious and secular discourse, rather than qualifying these efforts as strategically engaging with the secular. The liberated body and the “primacy of conscience”: secular and religious convergences Religious and secular discourse meet in more ways than in activist methods and use of scientific language. SRHR supporters often reveal an underlying modern understanding of the body and the individual. The body is considered in need of liberation and transformation, and a modern person shows that they possess reflexivity and an individualised understanding of themselves and their body. According to sociologist Chris Shilling, modern individuals are characterised by an increased concern “to define their bodies as individual possessions which are integrally related to their self-­ identities” (1997, 30, emphasis added). The women’s movement leading up to the articulation of SRHR maintained a central focus on the body from early on. The Boston Women’s Health Collective (BWHC) in the 1970s played a central role in promoting knowledge about women’s bodies and sharing (disappointing) experiences with health care providers. The BWHC women started meeting and working together to compose their own educational course material on women’s bodies and health. The introduction states: We wanted to share both the excitement and the material we were learning with our sisters. We saw ourselves differently and our lives began to change. . . . It was exciting to learn new facts about our bodies, but it was even more exciting to talk about how we felt about our bodies, how we felt about ourselves, how we could become autonomous human beings, how we could act together on our collective knowledge to channel the health care system for women and for all people. (Boston Women’s Health Collective 1970) It was crucial to them to gain better knowledge of their own bodies by relying on their own knowledge and experiences. Learning and sharing knowledge were transformative experiences. This inherent understanding

SRHR, liberated body, primacy of conscience 51 of liberation and transformation remains present in the later conceptualisation of SRHR. When SRHR are truly fulfilled, a transformative shift in body and life experience is implied or expected. In order to reach this fulfilment, a higher level of individualisation is needed. Feminist sociologist Patricia McFadden writes that social values that embrace higher levels of individualisation are crucial to bring about a desired transformation of women’s lives. For her, the opportunity of having individual choice in sexuality is central and needs to move beyond reproductive health and safe sexual behaviour: On one level, emotional calls are being made on women to conform to traditional roles as caregivers and nurturers. On another, their struggles for individual freedoms, social autonomy and bodily integrity are – often in subtle and devious ways – invalidated or curbed by a cultural climate that construes such choices and mobility as dangerous, irresponsible and selfish. (McFadden 2003, 4, emphasis added) McFadden describes traditional roles for women as nurturers and caretakers who willingly sacrifice their own needs. She argues that it is difficult for them to reach higher levels of individualisation that would enable them to claim and enjoy sexual and reproductive rights. McFadden draws from Audre Lorde to state that fully enjoying these rights would go beyond obtaining personal security and safety and should encompass a wider range of freedom in sexual choices that relies on women’s recognition of their own “erotic power” (Lorde 1982). Having access to that erotic power and making use of it requires highly individualised thinking and feeling processes. These feminist values underlying SRHR point therefore toward a reclaimed feminist body that is emancipated and liberated. Some of these feminist understandings resonate with religious supporters of SRHR, such as Catholics for Choice (CFC). For some theologians and Christian activists, it is imperative to reveal the historical contingency of the Vatican’s current position-­taking and to resist its absolutism as it has been enacted since the 1994 ICPD conference. This is one strategy among others to connect to an emancipatory agenda. The activist network CFC present themselves as articulating “an expression of Catholicism as it is lived by ordinary people: We are part of the great majority of faithful in the Catholic church who disagree with the dictates of the Vatican on matters related to sex, to marriage, to family life and to motherhood” (Harth 2008). This network has been the most vehement faith-­based opponent of the Holy See’s positions and attempted to remove the Holy See’s status as a non-­member permanent observer within the UN (Coates et al. 2014). In other words, CFC state to reclaim their own religious interpretations of gender and sexuality matters based on self-­described ‘ordinary’ women’s lived realities.

52  An Van Raemdonck I want to argue therefore that the notion of individuality and personal freedom of choice is equally present in CFC’s viewpoints, although it bears more on the individual conscience and the psyche rather than the physical body. CFC refer to “the primacy of conscience” and emphasise the importance of personal conscience more than established teachings by the church (Harth 2008). Respect and tolerance for individuals’ decisions is considered part of the history of Christian teachings. CFC asserts to be more representative of ‘ordinary’ Catholic believers than the church hierarchy, which they describe as a “minority on sexual and reproductive morals within Catholicism” (Harth 2008). Matters of marriage, divorce, parenting, and SRHR ought to be discussed within the field of public health and human rights, rather than religious doctrine, they argue. While firmly defending the primacy of conscience, they embrace public policymaking based on public health concerns and human rights. CFC strive to improve access to sexual and reproductive care and justice based on the lived realities and particular life conditions of women. The network privileges women’s own ability to make personal moral choices over their lives and bodies. Whereas personal conscience and moral decision-­ making is the primary focus, rather than the body, CFC equally supports SRHR, easily unsettling the conservative religious versus progressive secular binary. Similarly to CFC, the American Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) prioritises women’s personal choices. This interfaith coalition provides support to diverse religious communities that promote the principle of women’s choice, drawing on the ‘moral power’ and ‘religious beliefs’ to support their work (RCRC). In sum, the secular feminist movement’s concern with the body has been matched by a religious concern with personal conscience and morality, particularly within Roman Catholic Christianity. Family values, the natural family, and the naturalistic body: secular and religious divergences on SRHR In contrast to a liberal feminist analysis of transformative liberation through higher individualisation, or the prioritisation of women’s conscience, the Holy See and other Christian civil society groups that follow Rome’s teachings make passionate pleas to re-­valorise family values. Increased individualisation is seen as harmful. The mission of the Holy See at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 stated that the authentic and true advancement of women. . ., can only happen through the recognition of the deep fundamental anthropological truths about man and woman and not through the ‘exaggerated individualism’ which is promoted by the sexual and reproductive rights movement. (Coates et al. 2014, 120)

SRHR, liberated body, primacy of conscience 53 More recently, addressing an international summit on formulating post-­ 2015 development goals, the Holy See expressed support to: acknowledge and enable women to overcome barriers to equality without forcing them to abandon what is essential to them. [Women] exist within the context of relationships which provide meaning, richness, identity, and human love. Their relationships, especially their role within the family – as mothers, wives, and caregivers – have profound effects on the choices women make and their own prioritisation of the rights which they exercise across their lifespans. (Holy See 2014) The ‘family’ and ‘family values’ in the discourse of the Holy See “becomes the all-­encompassing rebuttal to both the existence of and requirement for sexual and reproductive health rights” (Holy See 2014). The family figures as the direct opposite of SRHR, and both are presented as antagonistic figures that are mutually exclusive. The Vatican has a long history of opposing any international declarations that might challenge the traditional heterosexual norm of the nuclear family (Radford Ruether 2008, 189). In this view, family is a sanctified union by God and refers to the lifelong marital pact between husband and wife. Women are not primarily perceived as individuals holding personal rights but are rather seen in a relational perspective. Women form part of a family and a wider community. Such views rely on a naturalistic view of the body as the “pre-­social, biological basis on which the superstructure of the self and society are founded” (Shilling 1997, 41). In this perspective, women’s bodies are first and most of all seen as biologically different than men’s bodies. Their bodies are ‘weak’ and ‘unstable’, and this explains the different social roles of women as they are naturally limited and defined by their biological and material limitations and capabilities. In line with these views, motherhood itself is naturalised. An analysis of religious anti-­abortion activists in the UK and Wales show that “[m] otherhood is constructed as ‘natural’ and sacred, therefore abortion must be damaging because it destroys women’s ‘natural’ position” (Lowe and Page 2018). For these activists, motherhood is essential and natural to womanhood, and abortion then naturally harms women. Since women are naturally driven to give life, abortion would cause severe psychological and spiritual stress and hardship. For them, women who seek abortion are seen as having no faith, being un-­religious, and as acting selfishly. Women seeking abortion do not respect the ‘natural’ morality that defines them as being a member of a larger whole such as family and society. In this societal organic conception, women understand their place and role as part of the larger structure in which they carry responsibilities. When they conceive themselves only as individuals, however, they seek to fulfil their own selfish interests and ignore their social responsibilities. With respect to

54  An Van Raemdonck conceptions of the body as an avenue to SRHR, secular and institutionalised religious concerns diverge. Beyond the religious-­secular binary The Holy See and Christian religious activist groups connect to secular concerns (such as human rights discourse) and deploy science-­based language in order to connect with a secularised audience. Particularly, conservative anti-­ abortion groups relied on these methods, which inspired institutionalised religious organisations such as the Holy See as well. Sociologist Vaggione has described these processes as ‘strategic secularism’, as mentioned earlier. He considers not only religious activists who are opponents of SRHR as ‘strategic secularists’, but equally so progressive religious groups, such as CFC, who are supporters of SRHR (Vaggione 2005, 237–240). The latter, progressive religious groups, have been described as tending “to speak the language of secularism with respect to sexuality and reproduction” (Sands 2000, 60). Theologians who develop positions against the dominant viewpoints of their institutions can therefore be situated in the middle ground between the religious and the secular, argues Vaggione. They engage in a form of dissidence or internal antagonism concerning gender and sexuality issues, for instance, by defending the use of contraception and being pro-­choice of abortion within their religious tradition. While remaining firmly embedded within ‘the religious sphere’ and expressing belonging there, they engage with opinions generally considered to be external or coming from ‘the secular sphere’. These dissident opinions, he argues, show the flexibility and porosity of the religious/secular boundaries. Moreover, “gender and sexuality need, also, to be understood as spaces where the religious and the secular fuse and interact” (Vaggione 2005, 251). Vaggione seems to suggest that issues of sexuality and gender provide the ideal fertile ground for processes of redefining the boundaries of religious and secular concerns and discourse. Christian theologian Maguire puts this into practice and suggests to present access to family planning, abortion, and contraception as human rights. Since human rights “have become the keystone of international ethics”, he believes that casting reproductive rights in terms of human rights offers the best of both worlds (2000, 190). Rights discourse can remove the topic out of the sphere of influence of religious orthodoxy while it still reflects the deeper religious concern with the sanctity of life, human dignity, and compassion, he argues. Contemporary theologies should be naturally interested to consider the conditions needed to protect and preserve our ecology of life: “The dignity of human life that undergirds all human rights claims cannot be honoured if the means to fertility control are denied” (Maguire 2000, 191). Maguire finds support in ethics to challenge religious orthodoxy against reproductive health, such as abortion, contraception, and family planning.

SRHR, liberated body, primacy of conscience 55 While Vaggione and Maguire encourage the incorporation of (secular) ethics, human rights, and the language of gender and sexual equality by theologians and religious groups, theologian Kathleen Sands has more reservations vis-­à-­vis such developments. She asserts that, instead, the very binaries of religious/non-­religious (and public/private) ought to be questioned. Rather than progressive religious actors retreating “from public ethical discourse on secularist principles”, she argues, they better reclaim a proper progressive religious public voice (Sands 2000, 61).2 Following the progressive religious retreat and embrace of secular language and principles, she states, the use of the secular/religious binary mainly serves conservative religious factions who are, on the contrary, not hesitant to claim public space. The real task for progressive religious forces would then be to occupy a stronger theological ground in the public space. Sand’s criticism is reminiscent of post-­secularist critique on the constitution of the religious and the secular as separate realms. Anthropologist and religious studies scholar Charles Hirschkind asserted that secularity is most of all about possessing a particular capacity to mobilise the religious/secular tension in a productive way (Hirschkind 2011, 643–644). In the frame of this discussion on secular and religious discourse on SRHR, I argue therefore that the religious-­secular binary can be called on and framed by multiple secular or religious actors, intendedly or unwittingly, resulting in the reinforcement of the public position and powers of either sides. Conversely, Sands’ criticism can be brought into relation with the welcoming of progressive religious groups by secular campaigners of SRHR. Some advocates call to include religious civil society groups and faith-­based organisations more thoroughly in campaigns to advance SRHR. Progressive religious supporters of SRHR and progressive gender roles are considered an important part of the larger struggle, for instance, by the Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL). This struggle is waged against what is identified as religious fundamentalisms, or “the use of religion . . . to legitimize  .  .  . authoritarian political power and to essentialize social control” (CWGL 2014). The CWGL suggests to keep a strong focus on secularism to secure elected representatives’ accountability, and on human rights, because a human rights approach to development “ensures transformational change” (CWGL 2014). Such instrumental reliance on progressive religious support can be considered as a form of strategically valuing these religious forces as far as they help to advance the common goals. Vaggione’s analysis of strategic secularism, when religious groups strategically employ secular language, can be easily reversed to capture how secular advocacy groups incorporate religious groups and authorities to endorse common goals. Viewing such initiatives as ‘strategic religiosity’ helps to place the idea of ‘strategy’ in perspective and to reveal underlying power dynamics. This mirror-­concept shows that the common goal, some progressive politics on family, gender, and sexuality, is generally identified as a secular one. Religious groups who endorse them

56  An Van Raemdonck are considered as aberrant exceptions that share in a common ‘secular’ goal. Seeing its mirror-­concept of ‘strategic religiosity’ allows us then to place the religious contribution central and understand religious progressive politics as an independent undertaking and substantiated goal or mission. In short, the concept of strategic religiosity helps to illuminate how progressive gender and sexuality politics becomes naturalised as secular.

Conclusion In this chapter, I  discussed different discursive engagements with Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. It is driven by a twofold aim: first, to destabilise common popular conceptions of a secular versus religious binary in matters of gender and sexuality; and second, to look at underlying motivations for support of SRHR and theoretical understandings of the body. I selectively reviewed feminist postcolonial literature on matters of sexuality and reproduction in postcolonial contexts, pointing at a turn toward the need for a higher appreciation of bodily knowledge, agency, and pleasure. Second, I looked at Catholic Christian institutionalised and non-­institutionalised groups, primarily the Holy See and the activist organisation Catholics for Choice. I showed that while there are underlying different motivations, support of SRHR cuts across the secular-­religious binary. Past and present feminist activism for SRHR have foregrounded the body and focused on bodily knowledge, liberation, and transformation. Catholic groups supportive of SRHR, however, focus on the mind by placing freedom of conscience and personal morality central. They contest hierarchical church teachings and reclaim Christian viewpoints on SRHR based on the experiences and lives of ‘ordinary’ community members. These secular-­ religious convergences in support of SRHR lead me to interrogate the meanings and effects of the secular-­religious binary. My argument is that religious supporters of SRHR find themselves captive of the public reinforcement of a secular vs. religious binary, which understands them to be either an anomaly or ‘strategic secularists’. This points at the need to occupy a stronger innovative public theological ground that transcends and disrupts the secular-­ religious binary. Finally, by introducing the notion of ‘strategic religiosity’, I aim to highlight processes through which progressive gender and sexuality politics become naturalised as ‘secular’.

Notes 1 The increased complexity of development’s involvement with sexual rights and what this means for anthropological and queer study is most clearly outlined by Christine’s Klapeer’s work and invites more theoretical and empirical involvement (Klapeer 2017). 2 She states that the ‘inefficiency’ of progressive religious groups to be heard publicly reaches beyond theology, and she understands that this “is due to forces that are social, economic and political, rather than simply ideological’ (Sands 2000, 64).

SRHR, liberated body, primacy of conscience 57

References American Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. https://rcrc.org/. Arnfred, Signe. 2005. Re-­ thinking Sexualities in Africa. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet. Bakare-­Yusuf, Bibi. 2013. “Thinking with Pleasure. Danger, Sexuality and Agency.” In Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure, edited by Susie Jolly, Andrea Cornwall and Kate Hawkins. London: Zed Books. Boston Women’s Health Collective. 1970. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Atria Books. Bracke, Sarah, and David Paternotte. 2016. “Unpacking the Sin of Gender.” Religion and Gender 6 (2): 143–154. Case, Mary Anne. 2016. “The Role of the Popes in the Invention of Complementarity and the Vatican’s Anathematization of Gender.” Religion and Gender 6 (2): 155–172. Cheng, Sealing. 2011. “The Paradox of Vernacularization: Women’s Human Rights and the Gendering of Nationhood.” Anthropological Quarterly 84 (2): 475–505. Coates, Amy L., Peter S. Hill, Simon Rushton, and Julie Balen. 2014. “The Holy See on Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights: Conservative in Position, Dynamic in Response.” Reproductive Health Matters 22 (44): 114–124. CWGL. 2014. “An Advocacy Brief: Post 2015 Development Agenda.” In Influences of Religious Fundamentalism on Sexual and Reproductive health and rights of women, edited by Center for Women’s Global Leadership. New Brunswick: Rutgers University. Fassin, Eric. 2014. “Same-­Sex Marriage, Nation, and Race: French Political Logics and Rhetorics.” Contemporary French Civilization 39 (3): 281–301. Groes-­Green, Christian. 2009. “Health Discourse, Sexual Slang and Ideological Contradictions Among Mozambican Youth: Implications for Method.” Culture, Health & Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care 11 (6): 655–668. Harth, Elfriede. 2008. The Impact of Religion on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Latin America Catholics for Choice. Presentation Delivered at the European Parliament, April 9, 2008. Hirschkind, Charles. 2011. “Is There a Secular Body?” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 633–647. Holy See. 2014. “Intervention at the 8th Session of the GA OWGs on SDGs: Promoting Equality, Including Social Equity, Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.” Holy See, February 6, 2014. Hulme, David. 2009. “Reproductive Health and the Millennium Development Goals: Politics, Ethics, and an ‘Unholy Alliance’.” BWPI Working Paper No. 105. Manchester: The University of Manchester. Jolly, Susie, Andrea Cornwall, and Kate Hawkins, eds. 2013. Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure. London: Zed Books. Klapeer, Christeen M. 2017. “Queering Development in Homotransnationalist Times: A  Postcolonial Reading of LGBTIQ Inclusive Development Agendas.” Lambda Nordica 22 (2–3): 41–67. Köttig, Michaela, Renate Bitzan, and Andrea Petó, eds. 2017. Gender and Far Right Politics in Europe. London: Palgrave Mcmillan. Lange, Siri, and Inge Tvedten. 2016. “Gender and Universal Rights: Dilemmas and Anthropological Engagement.” In Engaged Anthropology: Views from

58  An Van Raemdonck Scandinavia, edited by Tone Bringa and Synnøve Bendixsen, 121–145. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Lorde, Audre. 1982. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Zami/Sister Outsider/Undersong, edited by Audre Lorde. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club. Lowe, Pam, and Sarah-­Jane Page. 2018. “ ‘On the Wet Side of fhe Womb’: The Construction of ‘Mothers’ in Anti-­Abortion Activism In England dnd Wales.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 26 (2): 165–180. Maguire, Daniel C. 2000. “Religion and Reproductive Policy “ In God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life, edited by Kathleen M. Sands, 185–202. Oxford: Oxford University Press McFadden, Patricia. 2003. “Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice.” Feminist Africa 2. Mishtal, Joanna. 2015. The Politics of Morality. The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland. Ohio: Ohio University Press. Peñas Defago, Maria Angélica, and José Manuel Morán Faúndes. 2014. “Conservative Litigation against Sexual and Reproductive Health Policies in Argentina.” Reproductive Health Matters 22 (44): 82–90. Petchesky, Rosalind P. 2001. “Re-­Theorizing Reproductive Health and Rights in the Light of Feminist Cross-­Cultural Research.” In Cultural Perspectives on Reproductive Health, edited by Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer, 277–300. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pigg, Stacey Leigh, and Vincanne Adams. 2005. Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective. Durham: Duke University Press. Radford Ruether, Rosemary. 2008. “Women, Reproductive Rights and the Catholic Church.” Feminist Theology 16 (2): 184–193. Rashid, Sabina Faiz. 2008. “Small Powers, Little Choice: Reproductive and Sexual Rights in Slums in Bangladesh.” In Development with a Body, edited by Andrea Cornwall, Sonia Corrêa, and Susie Jolly. London: Zed Books. Sands, Kathleen M. 2000. God Forbid: Religion and Sex in American Public Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shilling, Chris. 1997. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage. Shweder, Richard. 2012. “Relativism and Universalism.” In A Companion to Moral Anthropology, edited by Didier Fassin, 85–102. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell. Undie, Chi-­Chi. 2013. “Why We Need to Think about Sexuality and Sexual Well-­ Being. Addressing Sexual Violence in Sub-­Saharan Africa.” In Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure, edited by Susie Jolly, Andrea Cornwall, and Kate Hawkins. London: Zed Books. Vaggione, Juan Marco. 2005. “Reactive Politicization and Religious Dissidence: The Political Mutations of the Religious.” Social Theory and Practice 31 (2): 233–255. van Raemdonck, An. 2018. “Paradoxes of Awareness Raising in Development: Gender and Sexual Morality in anti-­FGC Campaigning in Egypt.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 21 (10): 1177–1191. Vance, Carole S. 1984. Pleasure and Danger: Toward a Politics of Sexuality. Boston, London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

3 The religious embodiments of Drag Sethlas Blasphemous popular art and the religious/secular divide before the Spanish court Anne-­Marie Korte Introduction On 27 February  2017, a young Spanish primary school teacher, Borja Casillas, won first prize in one of the biggest Drag Queen Galas organised in Spain every year, acting as his drag persona, Drag Sethlas. In the carnival period in Las Palmas on the island of Gran Canaria, in the open air before an audience of 6,000 people, he performed a show named “My darling! I  don’t do miracles, may it be what God wants” (VaLen 2017). In this show, Casillas offered a three-­and-­a-­half-­minute spectacular performance in which s/he1 started as the Virgin Mary, appearing majestic in the style of a Semana Santa procession’s statue, above the head of several procession members who also played a role in this show. S/he subsequently changed into Jesus Christ on the cross, again as part of the procession, while singing songs by pop stars Madonna and Lady Gaga, praying the Our Father, and dancing provocatively to the Lord of the Night by Juan Magan. The almost immediate official reaction to this performance was condemnation by monsignor Francisco Cases, the bishop of the diocese of the Canarias, who lamented what he designated the “blasphemous frivolity” of the Drag Queen Gala and Casillas’ act particularly (El Pais 2017; Martin 2017). The Spanish Episcopal Conference (the national bishops’ conference) confirmed this statement. More than 33,000 people signed a petition  urging the organisers of the Las Palmas carnival to take responsibility for failing to respect Christians and their faith (Govan 2017). The Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers called for Casillas to be prosecuted for “crimes against religious sentiment”, which indeed took place and took almost 18 months to be settled (El Mundo 2017). Borja Casillas was ultimately acquitted because the Spanish court acknowledged that the context of the carnival should be seen as decisive for understanding Casillas’ act. This made the court declare that there was no offensive intentionality in this performance, and therefore no punishable act, mainly because, in this specific context, artistic and transgressive aims were allowed because of the carnival period (Reina 2018; La Sexta 2018).

60  Anne-­Marie Korte Why at present in Western secularised countries does the use of religious scenes, imagery, or ritual by female and queer pop artists (such as Madonna, Lady Gaga, Conchita Wurst and, in this case, Drag Sethlas) as part of their artistic work seem particularly prone to provoke accusations of blasphemy? And not only as part of the public debate, but also in a legal context? As we shall see, this is even the case in countries where the penal code hardly acknowledges this behaviour as an actual crime anymore. The question of what exactly is targeted by blasphemy accusations depends heavily on the way the local juridical systems to which they relate are organised, as will be shown in this article, wherein I focus on Casillas’ act. In this chapter, I will unpack this scene in several steps. After explaining my interest in this performance and discussing the theoretical assumptions and aims of my approach, I turn to the specific Spanish context around and in this scene. I will show how the official accusation of blasphemy before the Court of Gran Canaria was finally stopped, with the carnival setting as the main argument, and I will discuss Casillas’ act as a drag queen in a religious performance. Lastly, I will analyse some elements of the scene itself, which will bring me to formulate the conclusions of this analysis. Religious embodiment in popular forms of art plays its own specific role in these controversies, and this aspect is named and confronted in the allegations and processes of blasphemy.

Blasphemy accusations as part of cultural politics in Europe In earlier articles,2 I  have argued that the controversy sparked in Western secularised countries by feminist and queer works of popular art that embody religious scenes, imagery, and ritual is related to the identity politics of ethnic and sexual minorities and of religious communities, interest groups, and lobbyists involved in a fight over shifting positions of privilege and marginalisation in modern neo-­liberal societies.3 These processes are related to what Roman Kuhar and David Paternotte call the emergence of ‘anti-­gender movements’ that have appeared since the late 1990s in several European countries and elsewhere, particularly in Latin America (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017). Kuhar and Paternotte note that these movements should not be seen as just reiterating views of the past, but rather as new forms of mobilisation against gender and sexual equality. Also, these movements have a particular common pattern across national settings or regarding the conventional East-­West divide, which includes a shared discourse of anti-­ gender rhetoric, a travelling repertoire of protest activities, and comparable strategies of mobilising mass movements. Although national situations invoke differing reactions depending on local situations, all these movements take a stance on ‘gender ideology’ as lying at the heart of what they are fighting against. The term ‘gender ideology’ connotes here women’s and LGBTQ rights activism, as well as the scholarship deconstructing essentialist and naturalist assumptions about gender and sexuality. These

The religious embodiments of Drag Sethlas 61 movements fiercely oppose both the women’s and LGBTQ rights activities as well as what they esteem the theories behind these positions, leaning on conservative understandings of religion that promote natural sexual differences and gender complementarity. These debates often take the form of referring to the Roman Catholic moral doctrine, and in particular to the Vatican’s explicit anti-­gender position, formulated under the reign of Pope Benedict (2005–2013). But the way these movements are related to organised religions actually varies, too, from very loosely in secularised countries such as the Netherlands4 and Germany, to having more closely interlaced connections with the churches in countries like Poland, Italy, and Spain (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017, 1–22, 253–276). The cases of Pussy Riot (2012) and Conchita Wurst (2014), where blasphemy accusations were involved, can be placed against this background: they show deliberate and sometimes provocative interplay of gendered corporeality and non-­ normative sexuality with well-­known religious themes as the symbolic arena of this fight. The clashes that these works of art engender are positioned on the fault line of religion and secularity, and their controversiality is deeply embedded in the ideological debates over this demarcation (Korte 2014a; Igrutinovic, Sremac, and Van den Berg 2015; Van den Berg 2018; Weber 2014, 143–191). Common in these and similar cases are the legal charges of blasphemy filed against the performers of these acts, and in some cases also against the organisations that support them or make their work possible, such as museums or art foundations. These charges aim to stop these performances, to condemn their creators, or to let the institutions behind them feel the consequences of supporting these acts. These legal accusations of blasphemy come from bodies with different churchly connections: organisations that are either linked to religious organisations, such as political movements, or that have an explicit religious objective themselves, such as ecclesiastical boards or their representatives, but also lay organisations or religious associations centred on a particular occupation. Secular politicians and civil authorities, too, have launched these campaigns. What characterises the situation of Western countries is that in public opinion it was widely assumed that these charges would be on the decline. During the second half of the 20th century, the blasphemy laws in most Western countries were only occasionally invoked. Though blasphemy and comparable laws remained in the statute books of many European countries, they were rarely enforced. Considered remnants of earlier times, as largely dormant legal curiosities, the general assumption was that Western legal systems were heading towards their complete abolition. But although these laws have indeed been abolished in a limited number of northern European countries such as the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom during the past decade, this is certainly not a trend that is shared everywhere. Increasingly, European countries are in a situation where the anti-­gender movements described earlier are becoming more manifest, and the use of

62  Anne-­Marie Korte existing blasphemy laws by these movements to bring forward their political insights and exert influence should be taken seriously. Moreover, while in Europe the affairs that speak most to public opinion at the moment concerning the question of whether blasphemy laws should be abolished or rethought are the Rushdie affair of 1989, the Danish cartoons case of 2005, and the Charlie Hebdo case of 2015, it is also important to investigate the ways in which various forms of Christianity are involved in these debates (Koltay and Temperman 2017, 1–21).

Feminist and LGBTQ popular art works targeted by blasphemy accusations As mentioned previously, blasphemy and comparable laws, their applications, and their elaborations in various European countries differ considerably, and that is my starting point for the analysis of the Spanish case in this chapter. These laws protect religions, religious doctrines, and/or persons in different ways, in most cases directly related to historical and national interests. At the same time, the performances of feminist and queer artists and the reactions these performances have provoked have commonalities that cross national borders. Among a number of contemporary works of art accused of blasphemy or sacrilege in the context of cultural and religious identity politics in Western societies in recent years, religiously connoted feminist and LGBTQ art works and performances seem to stand out and to fulfil a particularly provocative role. Feminist and LGBTQ art works here refer to objects or acts created by artists, performers, and activists who have expressed with this work their aim to contribute to the emancipation of women and to the furthering of the rights of sexual and ethnic minorities. In their work, these artists consciously bring together emancipatory stances and core religious imagery, taken from their own (in most cases, Christian) upbringings. In the context of contemporary public debates on the rights of minorities, where freedom of speech and freedom of religion are often considered to be the central oppositional axis, these feminist art works seem to make paradoxical statements. They suggest that these rights could be affirmed simultaneously in the fight for gender and sexual and racial justice. Their works of art display an uncanny mixture of art and politics, religion and secularity, and sincerity and mockery. It is probably this hybridity that contributes greatly to the disputed status of these works of art. Apart from this hybridity, however, these art works also have particular common traits in their disputed imagery. They connect naked or otherwise explicitly gendered and sexualised human bodies, often recognisable as those of the artists themselves, to iconic sacred scenes of Western Christian culture and art, such as the suffering of Jesus on the cross, the Last Supper, the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, or the Pieta (Mater Dolorosa) (Korte 2009, 2014a, 2014b). These works of visual or performative art have been accused especially, more or less formally, of offence in terms of blasphemy or sacrilege,

The religious embodiments of Drag Sethlas 63 contributing to both their notoriety and their controversiality by causing huge media attention. From an intra-­religious or theological perspective, the blasphemy ascribed to these contentious works of art consists of violating the interdiction of representation of the divine and of trespassing against God as giver of this rule (Lawton 1993; Fisher and Ramsay 2000; Nash 2007; Wils 2007). On a more general level of mythic conception and cultic practice, the disputed status of these works of art is related to the problematic role and meaning of gendered corporeality in the religious iconography of the monotheistic religions  – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As classic feminist theology argues, where in these religions God is seen as transcendent, sovereign, male, and not bound to material existence, women are conceived to be totally ‘other’ than this God (Ruether 1983; Christ 1987; Plaskow 1991; Adler 1999; Althaus-­Reid 2006). To connect female and non-­white corporeality to the established symbols of divine reality, in particular to Jesus as God incarnate or to the Virgin Mary as the Mother of God, thus easily generates a judgement of blasphemy or sacrilege. Here, not concrete acts of hubris or mockery, but more general perceptions of and demarcations between the sacred and the profane determine the actual offensiveness (Althaus-­Reid 2000; Schneider 2010). On the level of social and cultural differences and tensions in modern societies, these accusations of blasphemy and sacrilege could also be considered as core disputes about values and norms in multicultural and multi-­religious societies, as clashes between various understandings and imaginaries of what is esteemed most valuable (Latour 2002, 2010). Some art critics and other scholars claim that allusions to female bodies and (homo)sexuality will by definition work provocatively in the context of iconic religious imagery because of the strong and potentially conflicting affective registers that are involved (Freedberg 1989, 317–344; Verrips 2008). Contrary to this view, I esteem a more fruitful approach that explores these contested works of art in relation to concrete historical processes of shifting gender positions and changing stances towards sexual diversity in Western modernity; and in relation to the social, cultural, and religious power struggles that these changes engender and embody (Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2004; Jordan 2011). For instance, as theologian Margaret Miles has shown, in the Renaissance period when the first collective shift of women from the private to the public sphere took place in Europe, female nakedness and sexuality became the focus of a newly explicit public and controversial figuration in the arts (Miles 1991, 169–189). Feminist historians and art critics have suggested that the 19th and 20th centuries’ women’s emancipation movements and the strong political and cultural opposition that these movements have met have created a similar impulse to explore gendered corporeality and sexuality in artistic imagination and cultural expressions (Heartney 2003, 2004, 2007).

64  Anne-­Marie Korte The many current cultural conflicts gravitating towards religiously founded normativity, gender roles, and sexual diversity are not only indicators of changing views of sexuality and procreation and their role in the formation of individual and collective identity, however, but also of the fundamentally changing role of religion in modern society, which has become private and public in new ways (Van den Berg et al. 2014). In her seminal lecture “Sexularism”, historian Joan W. Scott points to the 19th century’s increasing sexualisation of women – the reduction of women to body and sexuality – as an inherent part of the upcoming modern ideal of secularity in which the political and the religious, and the public and the private, became opposed in patterns of strengthened gender dichotomy, conceived as a natural distinction rooted in physical bodies (Scott 2009, 2018). According to Scott, it has to be acknowledged that the “domestication” of women, or their increasing assignment to the private sphere, as well as the simultaneous “feminisation of religion” took place in the context of the fast expansion of the modern Western political and cultural ideal of secularity: “The public-­private demarcation so crucial to the secular/religious divide rests on a vision of sexual difference that legitimises the political and social inequality of women and men” (Scott 2009, 4). In modernity’s secular ambitions, in its struggle with the hegemony of religious institutions and worldviews for liberal ends, ‘feminised’ religion, women’s religiosity, and female sexuality have become intertwined in their position as ‘the other’ of secular reason and modern citizenship, when during the processes of secularisation in the West, women became more and more exclusively associated with both religion and the private sphere. As Scott argues: the assignment of women and religion to the private sphere was not – in the first articulations of the secular ideal – about the regulation by religion of female sexuality. Rather feminine religiosity was seen as a force that threatened to disrupt or undermine the rational pursuits that constitute politics; like feminine sexuality it was excessive, transgressive and dangerous. (Scott 2009, 4) It is my contention that the many instances of alleged blasphemous imagery featuring gendered corporeality and non-­ heteronormative sexuality that make up the so-­called culture wars of the past two decades are related to a particular social and cultural shift in modern and predominantly secularising societies regarding the public meaning of both religion and sexuality. This shift concerns the position and public perception of both religion and sexuality as identity markers in their mutual interrelatedness. At stake is an oscillating relationship between religion and sexuality as modern individual and collective markers of identity. Significant in this instability is the emergence of a dichotomous public discourse in which a secular position is equated with acceptance of gender equality and sexualities in the plural

The religious embodiments of Drag Sethlas 65 versus a religious position which rejects this equality and sexual diversity. Until late into the 20th century in Western countries, religious identity counted as a primary marker of one’s social position, while sexual preference and behaviour were private to the degree of invisibility. More recently, the affirmation of sexual diversity in all its (public) manifestations for many has come to count as a core value of modern Western life, while religious identity has become for them a far more private factor. The cultural shift this implies could be seen as a reshuffling of prominence, power, and visibility in relation to the social and personal meaning formerly established of both religion and sexuality. The analytical perspective developed here helps to clarify why contemporary works of art and performances that openly combine ‘feminised’ religion and sexual diversity while intending to take critical feminist and LGBTQ stances are potentially transgressive in multifaceted ways and run the risk of being accused of offence, insult, and defamation, not only by conservative religious groups and leaders, but also by secular politicians and civil authorities.

The Spanish context: gender and queer religious (counter)protests Spain has one of the largest Roman Catholic populations in Europe. The identification of the Spanish nation with Roman Catholicism has deep roots, and national Roman Catholicism has been a very important component of contemporary Spanish nationalism. The explicit identification between Roman Catholicism and nationhood in the Spain of the Franco regime is gradually disappearing from the public discourse, but it remains an important marker for individual attachment to Spain (Pérez-­Díaz et al. 2010; Muñoz 2009). It is therefore remarkable that on 3 July 2005, Spain legalised same-­sex marriages in the context of installing measures concerning gender equality and sexual and reproductive rights (Platero 2007). It was a historical event that made Spain the third country in the world to introduce same-­sex marriage. Although the majority of the population supports these regulations, there is a continuing protest against them from the Roman Catholic Church and right-­wing parties (Alonso and Lombardo 2018). Recently, these protests have changed in outlook and have become more outspoken, as radical right-­ wing parties and lay Catholics have joined forces in their fight against what they call ‘gender ideology’. This is inspired by the political ‘culture wars’ taking place in North and South America which gravitate towards themes of gender and homosexuality, while, in Europe, recent Vatican documents on family values and sexual morality play a particularly dominant role. Spanish bishops were actually the first in 2001 to refer to ‘gender ideology’ in their attempts to resist the interests of feminists and LGBTQ activism, branding their view of gender as a cultural construct, an objectionable ideology. Since that time, several groups of so-­called anti-­gender activists have tried to initiate actions against same-­sex marriage, abortion, gender and sex education,

66  Anne-­Marie Korte same-­sex adoption, trans issues in public health services, and the presence of gender studies in public universities; although these initiatives have been a political success in terms of the mobilisation of large numbers of people, they have not been very successful in changing laws. The majority of Spanish Roman Catholics do not follow the Roman Catholic doctrine on private morality, and Spain is the European country where the most lay Catholics are in favour of Roman Catholic priests celebrating wedding ceremonies for same-­sex couples. The political climate is marked by this opposition in regard to family values and sexual morality, however, in particular since the election of a more conservative government in 2011 (Cornejo and Galán 2018; Paternotte 2015). Since a few years, there have been several counter-­ protests from the feminist and queer side against these extreme right political views. In these protests, Roman Catholic imagery is deliberately used to support a critical point. Examples are the Mary-­Vagina action during a march organised by the Spanish union of the General Workers’ Confederation on 1 May 2014 (Jones 2015), the ‘kissing Madonnas’ action on 18 June 2016 in Valencia on the occasion of Gay Pride (Church Militant 2016), and the Our Mother prayer of the Catalan poet Dolors Miquel, read at an awards event in Barcelona in 2016 (Anderson 2016). Borja Casillas’ performance thus seems to tie in with these forms of protest, which all make use of well-­known Roman Catholic imagery to vocalise their point of view. There is therefore a climate in which feminists and queer people feel the need to protest against the views of the Roman Catholic Church and the right-­wing parties that lean upon this Church in their defence of conservative family and sexual values by tapping into the religious sources of Christianity and creating their own form of protest. This serves as an initial explanation of why religious imagery is used at all in these situations. But at the same time these protests follow a specific Spanish Catholic imagination: in Casillas’ case, in the act that he performed at the Drag Queen Gala, he refers to the Semana Santa processions that are held in Spanish cities and villages in the week before Easter, so at the other end of the carnival period which announces Lent (Pilán 2011; Driessen and Jansen 2013; Leone 2014; Kuuva 2017). Both elements are important here: the carnival setting of the act means that mockery, provocation, and transgression could be expected, but the Semana Santa processions represent also more serious religious concerns, and they are moreover well known and familiar to most Spanish people. This second aspect here concerns the holy figures of Mary and Jesus, who appear in their conventional garments and pose, and who are lifted above the bearers of the procession as if on their shoulders; but it also applies to the secondary persons, the Nazarenes, who are dressed in the common outfit of the fraternities who organise these processions and play their role as members of the procession. Other themes in the short show are also directly taken from the passion procession: the penance (for the participants and spectators) and compassion (expressed by the suffering of

The religious embodiments of Drag Sethlas 67 Mary and Jesus) are worked out in this spectacle in the songs of Madonna and Lady Gaga which open the show. The most intriguing aspect is that all this changes within three-­and-­a-­half minutes: Mary becomes Jesus, the male Nazarenes become provocatively dancing women, the music goes from Madonna’s sung repentance to the rousing incantation of Juan Magan’s Lord of the Night, the static images of Mary and Jesus change into dancing persona, and their bodies become explicitly sexual. Before analysing this act in more detail and showing why I find this an extraordinary rendition based on the embodiment of well-­known Christian imagery, however, I will first discuss the formal accusations of blasphemy that have been articulated in this case.

The accusation of blasphemy: saved by the carnival period Borja Casillas must have been surprised by the vehement condemnations of his performance that arose directly after his show. Not only did the local and national bishops speak out against his act and declare it blasphemous, but the Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers also initiated a lawsuit against him and accused him of “crimes against religious sentiment” and “provoking discrimination, hatred and violence for religious reasons” (Información 2018), which ran for almost 18 months. Though hardly used, Spain still maintains what amounts to a law against blasphemy. Article 525 of the Spanish Penal Code forbids the defamation of any individual’s or group’s religious sentiments, beliefs, or practices. The entire scenario of this blasphemy case in court reminds me of the Pussy Riot trial in 2012. That case, which consisted of a very short punk art performance in the Christ the Saviour Church in Moscow with religious features comparable to Casillas’ case, also spurred the lamentations and accusations of the bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church the same day, followed by lawsuits from civil persons and groups, who were stirred up to press charges by the churchly parties. In this case, too, the members of Pussy Riot were completely surprised by the vehemence of these accusations. They were not only arrested, but they also had to declare their personal good intentions in the face of charges of hooliganism out of religious hatred. In the end, three members of the group were sentenced, and two had to serve two years in a prison camp (Korte 2014b, forthcoming). In the case of Casillas, after 18 months of prosecution, Casillas was acquitted of all charges. There are several reasons why this verdict was positive for Casillas, in contrast to how things turned out for the performers of Pussy Riot. Because of its anti-­religious past, Russia had a rather weak law against blasphemy at the time of the lawsuit against Pussy Riot, so it could only condemn “hooliganism out of religious hatred”. The lawsuit against three members of the Pussy Riot group was meant to strengthen the position of the Orthodox Church, and so it emphasised the element of religious hatred throughout the court case. Immediately after the case was closed, a new

68  Anne-­Marie Korte explicit law against blasphemy was added to the Russian Penal Code with reference to the Pussy Riot case. In Casillas’ case, the existing Spanish law was more explicit about the criminal aspects of the defamation of religious feelings, so the court could be more precise in forming its judgment. Also, the magistracy in Spain was more secularised and could weigh a broader number of arguments, both religious and secular. However, it was decisive in this case that the court, the Provincial Audience of Las Palmas, went along with the carnival argumentation that Casillas’ solicitor had brought in – the fact that the whole act had to be placed in the specific context and expectations of the carnival. The court pointed out the temporal and spatial scope in which the action was performed at the Drag Queen Gala of the Carnival of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Judge Pedro Herrera explained, on behalf of the Court: [I]t should not be overlooked that during carnival, a pagan festival takes place that is very settled in countries of Catholic tradition, with different and characteristic ingredients such as extravagant costumes, musical theatre, horseback riding, dances and street parties. (Información 2018) The magistrate pointed out that this festival, over time, “has been strengthened and consolidated as most peculiar and original, with a great public and with media impact not only at the local and regional level, but also national and I would say international” (Información 2018). According to him, such a gala takes place in this unique festive period in which permissiveness and joy are at the foreground, and in which the usual schemes and rules of conduct “that govern our daily work” are set aside for a short time. Judge Pedro Herrera also stated that this period of time is characterised by its transgressive nature, by its tolerance and openness regarding the themes, and by its exaggerated and daring staging. In this context, he declared that no affront or offensive conduct could be found, but rather a risky and daring one, as was the case with the defendant in his role as Drag Sethlas, who supported his interpretation “with the symbolism of Catholic prayers”, in particular the scenery of the Semana Santa. In the view of the court, what Casillas ultimately did was to refer to images, ceremonies, and concrete acts connected with the Roman Catholic religion, mixed with dance and music, and with the provocative and transgressive sense that characterises that gala. But, as the court ruling stated, “there is no possibility to infer from the actor’s content that the actor has questioned the dogmas and rites of that particular confession, nor that he has offended religious sentiments” (Información 2018). It is a remarkable outcome that the main argument of the court in not declaring Casillas’ performance intentionally offensive was built on this event taking place in the period of an originally ‘pagan’ feast, the provocative and transgressive setting of which could be acknowledged by the audience, irrespective of their individual backgrounds.

The religious embodiments of Drag Sethlas 69 But let us go further now and try not only to see what Borja Casillas did not do, but what he actually did in this scene.

A drag queen dressed in religious imagery Borja Casillas is a professional drag queen who has competed in several drag queen competitions in Spain. Drag queen shows like these are among the most visible and established forms of entertainment and mockery in which heteronormative masculinity is challenged by gender reversal and by explicit sexual behaviour. At the same time, homosexual masculinity becomes affirmed in these shows by its stereotypical reversal in hyperbolic heteronormative femininity, which gives these shows their ambivalence and makes them hotly disputed in queer theory (Levitt et al. 2018; Stone and Shapiro 2017; Egner and Maloney 2016; Greaf 2016). Possibly Casillas deliberately decided to undermine this heteronormative femininity, giving his act a gender political load by taking up fully fledged Christian imagery and presenting this with his own twist.5 The work of Cristina Garrigós, a Spanish literary critic and gender scholar, could help to clarify Casillas’ actions (Garrigós 2017). Garrigós engages with female punk artists and focuses on the use of religious iconography in relation to eroticism in the works of Spanish punk artists in popular music. The use of religious iconography is, according to her, very important to question gender stereotyping. Garrigós claims to have found a remarkable difference between male and female punk artists in their use of religious iconography. While in the case of male artists, rage and mockery regarding the religious imagery dominate their acts, female punk artists are far more ‘introverted’: they identify with their own religious heritage and they project their struggle into their material. This is also visible in the recent Spanish protest actions against the right-­wing parties originated by feminists and queers using religious imagery that I recalled earlier. In these cases, the seriousness, serenity, and lack of rage these protests reflect are signs of the introverted style that Garrigós describes. This could also be the case with Casillas and his drag persona Drag Sethlas. S/he acts according to the Spanish female punk artist model: s/he identifies with her/his own religious heritage and projects her/ his struggle into these materials by playing the roles of Mary and Jesus her/ himself. But actually s/he does more, and this forms the ‘drag’ aspect of the act: there is an explicit erotic part in Drag Sethlas’ performance, and rage and mockery towards her/his religious heritage have a distinctive place in this act, and not only because of its coincidence with carnival. This element cannot be found in the religiously controversial performances of Madonna, Lady Gaga, Pussy Riot, or Conchita Wurst, as I will show. I already mentioned the many changes in Drag Sethlas’ performance: Drag Sethlas acts as Mary who becomes Jesus, the male Nazarenes change into provocative dancing women, the music goes from Madonna’s sung repentance via Lady Gaga’s Judas to the arousing incantation of Juan Magan’s

70  Anne-­Marie Korte Lord of the Night, the iconic images of Mary and Jesus change into dancing persona, and their bodies become explicitly sexual through music, dance, and gesture. The most radical alterations lie in the agency and non-­ normative sexual behaviour that Drag Sethlas contributes to both Mary and Jesus. Not only do Jesus and Mary dance, speak, sing, and act about their sexual longing, but that longing is also in both cases unexpectedly transgressive. Mary sings about her ambivalent love for the traitor and outcast Judas, and Jesus shows his sexual needs: to be in charge of the sexual satisfaction of others, to touch himself, and to be touched, even whipped, by others. When in this show Jesus first appears, he is lifted in a frozen and dying position on the cross, and a dark male voice speaks the official Our Father in Spanish, until this prayer reaches the sentence about the forgiving of sins. Then Jesus comes to life, steps from the cross, and begins to speak: “Do you want my forgiveness? Bend over and enjoy. Feel me in your mouth. Kneel down.” He thus offers forgiveness, revisiting the theme with which the scene started, which was sung by Madonna: “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee. And I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishment. But most of all, because I have offended Thee (and I want to be good)”. The actual forgiveness this Jesus offers combines redemption and surrender in the same act: “Bend over and enjoy”. This agential and transgressive sexual appearance of Drag Sethlas as Mary and Jesus is in my view an original feature. In the acts of Madonna and Lady Gaga to which her/his performance refers, the artist’s relationship with Jesus is much more ambivalent: Madonna is frozen, almost a ‘still life’ when she sings her song Live to Tell on the cross in the Confessions on a Dancefloor show (MadonnaConfessionsTV 2010), and Lady Gaga dances in her clip Judas around Judas (and Jesus), but never becomes him (Lady Gaga 2011). In the case of Drag Sethlas, s/he is the performer that becomes both Jesus and Mary, and in these roles s/he not only sings and dances, but is ‘touched’ by others as well. What I  hope to have shown is that for Casillas there is more at stake here than a simple protest against the Roman Catholic Church and its anti-­ gender position. There is both a secular and a religious protest in this act, but Casillas also seeks to obtain both secular and religious recognition by it. I see the secular recognition he is looking for in the fact that Drag Sethlas, as a drag queen, shows explicit and transgressive sexuality, in opposition to, for instance, Conchita Wurst, who sticks to the iconic pose of Jesus with outstretched arms in her 2014 Eurovision Song Contest act and plays only gently with her name and her beard to show her transgressive sexuality (Weber 2014, 143–191). Finally, the longing for religious recognition is contained in the name Casillas has given to his performance: “My darling! I  don’t do miracles, may it be what God wants”. This tongue-­in-­cheek title could be taken for religious wordplay, according to the roles that Drag Sethlas has taken up in her/his act: are these the words of Mary, of Jesus, or of Casillas himself?

The religious embodiments of Drag Sethlas 71 The Virgin Mary could be a good candidate, for she is, according to the New Testament, very famous for her accepting role in the salvation history (“Be it unto me according to thy word”, Lucas 1:38), but this is hardly a surprising statement. Are these then the words of Jesus himself? I  do not think that Jesus would claim to do no miracles. So I am inclined to say that these are the words of Casillas himself: “I don’t do miracles, may it be what God wants”, which could even be read as a prayer. This is a conclusion that I find really surprising and funny: Casillas leaves the interpretation of the whole scene to God.

Conclusion Casillas’ performance as Drag Sethlas at the Drag Queen Gala in Gran Canaria is an example of European trends of activist and artistic protests against the ‘anti-­ gender’ offensive of the Roman Catholic Church and right-­wing parties. Casillas definitely had not foreseen the Spanish bishops immediately protesting against this act as “blasphemous frivolity”, nor that the Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers would prosecute him for 18 months for “the questioning of dogmas and rites of a particular confession” and “the offending of religious sentiments”. But these reactions made clear that his performance, in which (trans)gender and non-­heteronormative sexuality undoubtedly played key roles, was seen as an eminent part of the ‘gender ideology’ that is being rejected by the groups represented by the Spanish bishops and the Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers. My previous research has shown that, in the Western context, well-­known pop artists identifying personally and notably with their bodies as Mary or Christ, as is the case with Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Conchita Wurst, are very vulnerable to accusations of blasphemy. This is also the case with the performance of Borja Casillas. In this personal identification, the feminist or queer message that the artist presents is inscribed in his/her own body and is reinforced with the religious images of the Virgin Mary and Christ that ‘fit’ her/his body. Religious imagination plays its own specific role in these controversies, and it is precisely in the blasphemy allegations and processes that this aspect is picked out and emphasised. Here, both the gender/LGBTQ representation and the religious role that has been appropriated have a distinct role. Whereas for the gender and LGBTQ performers, the religious imaginative role of Jesus and Mary gives a sacred allure to their statement of gender and sexuality identity, the reverse is true for the ones that oppose them. For them, their primary identity rests upon identification with Jesus and Mary as their heavenly and ‘eternal’ representatives, and the fluid gender and sexual identities given to these figures in these performances they cannot accept. Very interesting in Casillas’ case is the court’s response, which has as its core that a pagan feast determines the rules under which Casillas’ actions fall. His actions therefore do not count as a violation of existing rules. This

72  Anne-­Marie Korte is a creative twist in which the exceptionality of the situation is confirmed in terms that distances the court from the Catholic Church. However, this is not only a reference to secular society: here, a ‘state of exception’ is confirmed by the reference to a pagan feast, which in this case offers protection to Casillas. But as I have argued in this analysis, in Casillas’ case there is also a “questioning of dogmas and rites of a particular confession”. The performance is embodied in a person who clearly has his origins in the Catholic Church and shares its cultural imagery; he also speaks to people who are familiar with this Church and its practices. The performance shows a mixture of religious sincerity and religious mockery, of entertainment and social protest. There is also a certain influence of popular religion and liberation theology in which religious and secular cultures intermingle; they form a resource of alternative imagery with which artists and activists can engage.

Notes 1 Drag Sethlas is the name Borja Casillas employs for his presentations in drag shows. I use here ‘Casillas’ and ‘he’ to refer to his acts outside and related to these shows, such as in newspapers, interviews, and on the internet. When describing Casillas’ activities as a drag queen, I use ‘she/he’ because of his drag persona and because of the actual performance as Mary and Jesus in this act. 2 This article builds on two earlier publications and uses a similar theoretical introduction to that in these texts: (Korte 2014a, forthcoming, 20). See also (Korte 2014b, 2009). 3 For comprehensive and critical overviews of contemporary art accused of blasphemy, see (Plate 2006; Coleman and Dias 2008; Verrips 2008; Heartney 2011; Coleman 2011; Meyer, Korte, and Kruse 2018). 4 But note the appearance in the Netherlands of the translation of the Nashville Statement, originally published in August 2017 in Nashville, Tennessee (US) by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. This statement confirms marriage as a covenant of one man and one woman designed by God, and denies marriage that is homosexual, polygamous, or polyamorous. In January 2019, this declaration was signed by about 250 clergyman and prominents of the orthodox side of the Protestant churches in the Netherlands. 5 On this point, I  could not get any information directly from Borja Casillas. In interviews, he mainly states his ‘credentials’, namely that it was not his intention to hurt anyone: “I am a non-­practising Catholic. I have done my first communion and I studied religion [as part of his education as a comprehensive schoolteacher]. I understand the people who have been offended, but I ask them to understand my show. I do everything from my heart.” Reina, “Drag Sethlas: ‘Mucha Gente Reza por Mí’,” accessed 20 January 2020.

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Introduction to narrating bodies Nella van den Brandt, Mariecke van den Berg, Megan Milota, Nawal Mustafa, and Matthea Westerduin In this section we explore narratives of embodied transformation: that of healthy bodies into sick bodies, of bodies that move from one gender expression to another, bodies moving into or within religious traditions, and those that participate in processes of intersubjective change. We like to start our introduction with a brief note on methodology. Although the focus on narrative is the common thread, we approach the relation between narrative and the body using different methodologies, depending on our material and main research concerns. In her analysis, Nella van den Brandt creatively combines conceptual frameworks from anthropology, religious studies, and conversion studies in order to analyse memoirs as a particular form of storytelling that reflects everyday life but simultaneously as a social process and an act of subject-­formation and meaning-­making. As conversion storytelling can abide to, negotiate with, or subvert dominant expectations about religion, ethnicity, and gender, the memoirs are considered to be embedded in relations of power and difference. Mariecke van den Berg creates a dialogue between two ‘fields for the study of change’, namely transgender studies and conversion studies, and uses this conversation in her analysis of autobiography. Transgender studies and conversion studies relate to the body-­in-­ transition in different ways, and both are needed if one wants to understand how gender and religious transformations are often related. Megan Milota departs from the literary studies concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom, in order to explore the ways in which literature can shape a reader’s ethical stance. In addition, she draws from the overlapping academic fields of narrative ethics and narrative medicine to illustrate why thinking about and with stories constitute a form of ethical engagement. Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin use the concept of transformative conversation in order to theorise the lack of engagement with particular types of knowledge within academia. They illustrate the depth and insights that can be drawn from religious knowledge when, and if, politicised in a particular way. In their contribution they show the similarities and the differences of their own experiences as both gendered and racialised.

78  Nella van den Brandt et al. These four chapters make clear how in autobiographical narratives, different transformations are often related. In his illness pathography, When Breath Becomes Air – which is analysed in Megan Milota’s chapter – author and neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi describes the transformation of his vital body into a terminally ill body and links this to his newly developed religious perspective. For the women whose memoires are discussed in the chapter by Nella van den Brandt, religious conversion implies new negotiations with gendered bodies and erotic desires. Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin show in their self-­narratives how transformation occurs through interaction, comparison, and reflection based on their similar but different experiences. Their chapter can be seen as a theoretical reflection and as transformation in practice. For the authors of the autobiographies discussed in the chapter by Mariecke van den Berg, the process of gender transformation or confusion is accompanied by religious relocations within Judaism. A primary observation that can be made on the basis of this section is therefore that existential human transformation often plays out simultaneously on different interrelated spheres of life: it is related to experiences of the body, religious traditions, gender, and desire. A second observation is that transformation does not happen in a vacuum; it does not only pertain to the individual subject of transformation. Obviously, significant human transformations, such as the ones we are dealing with in these chapters, also affect the people who are close to the ones undergoing transformation. However, we here also (and perhaps more so) refer to an understanding that transitions related to health, religion, and gender are not neutral. They take place in social, political, and religious contexts that ascribe all kinds of meaning to old and new selves, old and new communities, old and new worldviews. van den Brandt, for instance, discusses the experiences of women who convert to Judaism and Islam, and who therefore share the experience of moving into what in the context of Western Europe are minority religions. It does matter, however, that Islam and Judaism are perceived very differently by mainstream society. The conversion memoirs show that while room for diversity and pluralism is recognised when it comes to Judaism, Islam is often thought to be much more monolithic. The chapter by van den Berg shows that processes of gender transformation or confusion not only destabilise notions of femininity and masculinity but may also be an occasion for the generation of new and inclusive theological perspectives. Along the same line, Mustafa and Westerduin explore in their chapter how specific advantages and disadvantages are allocated to themselves as individuals due to their different positions in terms of gender, race, and religion. They show how the representation of both Christianity as well as Islam does not always align with their own experiences and expertise of their respective religion. They moreover demonstrate how the notion of displacement, especially in academia, led to the start of their conversation and essentially enabled themselves to transform. The chapter by Milota demonstrates that Kalanithi’s transition from

Introduction to narrating bodies 79 successful neurosurgeon to cancer patient also implies a transition from a respected position in a ‘Grey’s Anatomy’-­like lifeworld to that of a largely anonymous and disempowered patient. As such, human embodied transformations, while experienced primarily individually, are embedded in much wider social structures of power and related subject positions, and societal, communal, or academic mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The ‘transformers’ in our chapters are conscious of the fact that their transformations are normatively charged, and they take the general conventions that they expect to exist about their transformations into account in the narratives they construct. They ‘talk back’ to dominant and sometimes stigmatising assumptions about their religion (van den Brandt), gender identity (van den Berg), or position on the margins of a health-­dominated society (Milota). Mustafa and Westerduin are themselves part of a process of intersubjective transformation. Their chapter reflects on the way in which their transformative experience is embedded in, and speaks back to, dynamics of gender, religion, and race. A third observation is that our chapters describe various ways in which narratives of transformation can be considered potential tools for change. By going public with their stories, the ‘transformers’ in our chapters share a search for witnesses who are willing to read, sympathise, be moved, and eventually have their thoughts and actions changed by these narratives of transformation. Our chapters therefore raise questions about the ethics and politics of transformation: how do narratives of embodied transformation incite notions of living a ‘good’ or ‘devout’ life? How do gender transition and religious conversion potentially form a critique of established notions of gendered or racialised religious subjectivities? How do we draw inspiration from the richness of religion while we attempt to critique it? Can our differences lead to transformation when in critical dialogue? And finally, how do narratives of transformation shed light on a diversity of experiences of individual subjects in, to, and across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? In this part of the volume, we thus turn to narratives of transformation as disruptive accounts that hold the potential to be tools for change. Yet we also acknowledge that there are limits to this ‘disruptive potential’. In order to be intelligible, the authors discussed in or of our chapters need to relate to the very conventions they often set out to criticise. Moreover, they need to relate to narrative conventions, especially when operating, as they do, in the specific genre of life writing. Their narratives of change therefore need to relate to literary and storytelling conventions of what change should look like, how it should come about, how it should be experienced, and how it should be narrated. The plot is never only in the hands of the person who tells the story. In our chapters, then, we explore moments of disruption as well as of affirming conventions. As a final observation, it is worth noting that these chapters have all chosen the body as a particular locus of attention. As van den Berg argues in her chapter, the genre of life writing has been rather ‘disembodied’ for a

80  Nella van den Brandt et al. long time, but this is currently changing. Many individuals whose bodies have not been represented equally over the course of history are now choosing precisely these disenfranchised bodies as a point of departure for telling their stories. Often, we found, the ‘transformers’ we analyse, and sometimes we ourselves as transformers, want to address norms and conventions that are played out on the body, just as the body also forms a site of resistance and negotiation.

4 Negotiating transformation and difference Women’s stories of conversion to Judaism and Islam Nella van den Brandt Introduction I muse on my complicated relationship to God. . . . This is how I must live if I am to find peace, bringing together the holy and the profane. (Mann 2007, 324–326) During this time I  came to understand a lot about myself, human beings, faith and the meaning of marriage and friendship. Human beings will always disappoint. But God is there. (Backer 2016, 364) Stories have a habit of generating stories. They come to nest, one inside the other, like Matryoshka dolls, each a window into another’s world. . . . Our lives are storied. Were it not for stories, our lives would be unimaginable. Stories make it possible for us to overcome our separatedness, to find common ground and common cause. (Jackson 2013, 229; 240)

The first two quotations are taken from memoirs written by women who live in different Western European contexts and turned to Judaism and Islam. Reva Mann’s memoir, The Rabbi’s Daughter, tells the story of the daughter of a liberal rabbi becoming strictly Orthodox; Kristiane Backer’s memoir, From MTV to Mecca, narrates her moving from a lifeworld of show business to becoming Muslim. The last quotation is taken from The Politics of Storytelling by anthropologist Michael Jackson. Together, the quotations convey some of the themes that are of interest to many scholars of religious conversion: conversion as a trajectory that includes changing perceptions of identity and the self, as well as shifting relationships with others, God, and different realms of life. But also: conversion as a story with a ‘social life’ (Jackson 2013, 227) as being influenced by and influencing other stories and other lives. In this chapter, I  contribute to discussions about religion, storytelling, identity, subject-­formation, and conversion, by drawing upon an analysis of four recent memoirs written by women who turn to Judaism and Islam.

82  Nella van den Brandt The analysis focuses on the ways in which female converts to Judaism and Islam negotiate their faith, transform their everyday life, and learn to inhabit social relations in new ways. This comparative analysis is relevant for various reasons. For one, the gendered experience of conversion is rarely studied from a cross-­religious perspective. Second, focusing on two minority traditions in Western European contexts enables gaining comparative insights into multiple majority-­minority relationships. In what follows, I first conceptualise stories of conversion by drawing from discussions about storytelling in religious studies and anthropology, and connecting these insights to conversion studies. Next, I introduce and analyse four memoirs by critically utilising the concepts syncretism and symbolic battle (Wohlrab-­Sahr 1999), in order to look at the ways in which female converts narrate their past commitments and selves and their current religious environment. In conclusion, I draw attention to the different ways in which conversion to Judaism and Islam is politicised in Western European contexts.

Conversion stories Authors across the humanities and social sciences have pointed at the centrality of narrative and storytelling for constructing subjects’ sense of self and being-­in-­the-­world. Subjects tell and live stories that, according to theologian Ruard Ganzevoort (2014), simultaneously invite and serve them to see the world in a certain way and act accordingly. The interaction with the religious tradition to which subjects belong is crucial as the latter “offer[s] possible worlds, created through narrative and portrayed in stories and symbols, rituals and moral guidelines” (Ganzevoort 2014, 1). In pluralistic and individualised Western European contexts, life stories and narrative constructions of the self can be approached as an important medium through which to study the manifestation and functions of religion. Religious studies scholars Marjo Buitelaar and Hetty Zock push such ‘self-­narratives’ forward as an important opportunity to study the presence of religious voices (2013, 3). Anthropologist Michael Jackson argues for a cross-­cultural understanding of what he calls the ‘narrative imperative’ as both social-­political and existential. In his theorisation that departs from, and revises, the work of Hannah Arendt (1958), storytelling is considered a strategy for transforming private into public meanings, and vice versa. It is simultaneously “a vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances” (2013, 34). Jackson explains that “[t]o reconstitute events in a story is no longer to live those events in passivity, but to actively rework them, both in dialogue with others and within one’s own imagination” (2013, 34). Conversion can be considered as such a disempowering circumstance: it refers to an often slow and gradual, sometimes rapid, religious and social transformation that may unsettle an individual life trajectory, since it forces one to learn to inhabit new ways of being in relationship to oneself, the community one belongs to, and God.

Negotiating transformation and difference 83 In such a context of change, according to Jackson, stories may help people to discern and determine the meaning of our journey through life. A conversion story is precisely that: a story about “where we came from and where we are going” (2013, 36). This conceptualisation of conversion stories seems close to philosopher Charles Taylor’s emphasis on the connection between notions of the self, narrative, and the ethical or religious realm: Our lives exists in this space of questions, which only a coherent narrative can answer. In order to have a sense of who we are, we have to have a notion of how we have become, and of where we are going. (1992, 47) However, while conversion can indeed be a disempowering circumstance, it might as easily be experienced as an empowering one: conversion can open up towards new, or expanded, horizons of thought, imagination, and action. And while Jackson emphasises the function of storytelling as a way of coping with crisis, stalemate, or loss of ground, enabling us to “renew our faith that the world is within our grasp” (2013, 36), as this chapter will show, stories of conversion can also be about giving up a notion of control over one’s life. This giving up of full autonomy takes place through giving in to God’s calling or a desire to belong elsewhere, no matter the uncertainties tied to it. Notwithstanding these remarks on the applicability of Jackson’s framework for the study of conversion stories, I agree with his claim that we need to understand and explore storytelling as a social process and an act of meaning-­making (2013, 34–41). In what follows, I  discuss stories of conversion not as ‘texts’ (which is the work of literary theory) but as stories embodied by subjects who participate in the full stream of their social and religious lives, embedded in webs of power relations. As such, stories of conversion are “produced in social contexts by embodied concrete people experiencing the thoughts and feelings of everyday life” (Plummer 1995, 16). Exploring conversion stories may provide insights into the ways in which conversion has been experienced. Studying memoirs therefore needs to negotiate a complex terrain that includes an awareness of narratives as constructed, as well as an appreciation of storytelling as a deliberate act of identity construction, subject-­formation, and meaning-­making. For example, sexual health researcher Marianne Cense and theologian Ruard Ganzevoort (2018) consider life storytelling as subjects’ reflections on their embodied experiences and the social reality around them. A double negotiation is intrinsic to life storytelling, in which, on the one hand, material reality is turned into narrative. On the other hand, narrative is simultaneously turned into material and behavioural reality, and as such, as the authors put it, narrative “facilitate[s] new experiences and changes in reality” (Ibid., 6). Crucially, in addition to the aforementioned sketched complex and multifaceted relationship among stories, subjectivity, and experience, storytelling needs to be related to power and difference. Especially storytelling

84  Nella van den Brandt by marginalised individuals and communities in society can have political effects when they talk back to universalist frameworks. In that light, stories of conversion, in particular conversion to minority traditions, may unsettle dominant expectations about religion, ethnicity, and belonging. This chapter will demonstrate that conversion stories told by people who turn to minority traditions on the basis of a notion of autonomous choice can be counter-­voices to essentialist understandings of boundaries between differentiated social and religious groups and majority and minority positions and identities. Cultural theorist Gauri Viswanathan (1998) therefore considers conversion to be potentially a position of resistance, from which counter-­narratives to dominant notions of the nation, community, and subjectivity can be envisioned. Alternatively, or simultaneously, converts might be foremost interested in constructing a story that is legible for the multiple audiences they have to relate to. Conversion stories might closely follow the scripts laid down for conversion narratives by the respective religious tradition and community. Religious studies scholar Geraldine Mossiere, for example, understands conversion narratives as designed to make the story being told “ideologically consistent with the norms of the community of adoption, symbolically coherent with personal experience, and socially acceptable for the community of origin” (2016, 99). This chapter will show how converts need to negotiate this ambiguous position: conversion may provide subjects a positionality that enables critique, subversion, and creativity, but it may as easily situate subjects in a tensioned terrain of having to prove one’s faith, belonging, and loyalty to the community of origin or the community of adoption, or to both. This conceptualisation applies to the conversion stories investigated in this chapter. However, the genre of memoirs adds another element to the definition: since memoirs are published with the hope to reach a large and diverse audience, the story being told needs to connect in some way to broader social and cultural expectations of what a conversion looks like in relation to the particular religious tradition and community of adoption. However, memoirs can abide to, negotiate with, or subvert such social and cultural expectations about the self, change, tradition, and community, and they can do this in implicit or explicit ways. Double bind of conversion From here, I  find it useful to draw upon the work of sociologist of religion Monika Wohlrab-­Sahr to approach women’s memoirs of conversion for the ways in which notions of self, change, tradition, and community are formulated. Based on her qualitative research among Islamic converts in Germany and the US, Wohlrab-­Sahr (1999) draws attention to converts’ complex positioning in terms of religion, culture, and belonging. She considers the study of the phenomenon of conversion to Islam in contemporary Western societies to be structurally relevant because of what she calls

Negotiating transformation and difference 85 ‘the double frame’: the positionality of converts between the religious, cultural, and social frame they turn away from but stay related to, and the new religious and cultural frame they turn to, “but with which they cannot completely merge” (1999, 352). Therefore, she continues, the study of conversion to Islam is not only about Islam, but is also at least as much about the circumstances under which conversion takes place. This double bind of conversion, or the in-­between positionality of converts, is a way of further conceptualising conversion stories as negotiating a terrain of dis/empowering transformation. The double frame, and the tensions inherent in it, are according to Wohlrab-­Sahr, fundamental to the meaning of conversion. For converts to Islam in the US and Western Europe, embracing what is in political rhetoric and public discourse often perceived to be a foreign religion can be a means of articulating within one’s own social context one’s distance from this context and one’s conflictive relationship towards it (1999, 352). Wohlrab-­Sahr’s assumption of conversion as distancing oneself from the religious, cultural, and social frame one turns away from needs to be extended, I think, from individual converts’ perceptions and experience to a broader religious, cultural, and social setting that may perceive converts in a particular way. As alluded to earlier, conversion can indeed be a highly politicised move. Conversion can take place from a position of resistance, but importantly, conversion can also be resisted by others, such as family members, friends, and colleagues, but sometimes also by strangers. Both forms of resistance may contribute to a convert’s in-­between positionality. Especially women’s conversion to Islam is in Western contexts often considered as inherently political given the fact that “gender issues have been pivotal in the construction of Otherness between ‘Islam’ and the ‘West’ ” (van Nieuwkerk 2006, 1). However, also conversions to other minoritised traditions, depending on the historical, political, and religious context of discussion, can be politicised transformations (Viswanathan 1998). For example, a few decades ago, conversion to (strict) Orthodox Judaism in Western contexts similarly took place from a position of resisting geopolitical constellations and/or mainstream culture and society (Aviad 1983). Moreover, women’s contemporary embrace of Orthodox Judaism in the Netherlands is at times resisted by significant others (Mock-­Degen 2009). Converts to Judaism therefore similarly need to be understood as having to negotiate, at times, the double bind of conversion. A simultaneous development over the latter half of the 20th century regarding Jewish conversion can be found in the relationship between established Jewish communities in Israel and the US and tribal groups throughout Africa and Asia, who regard themselves as Jews, such as the Abayudaya of South Africa and the Mizo (or Bene Menashe) of northern India and Burma (Charmé 2012; Egorova 2015). For Israeli Jewish organisations and the Israeli state, recognition of the Jewishness of individuals and communities belonging to these tribal groups is based on an essentialist view of Jewishness and is oriented toward conversion to Orthodox Judaism and preparation for immigration to Israel

86  Nella van den Brandt (Charmé 2012; Egorova 2015). Contemporary American Jewish organisations reflect greater denominational diversity, as well as a more postmodern understanding of Jewishness as fluid and open-­ended (Charmé 2012). This brief exploration shows how recent and contemporary Jewish conversion is enmeshed with issues such as cultural critique, race, immigration, belonging, and the very definition of Judaism. Highlighting the relationships that converts articulate towards their social environments and their past commitments, Wohlrab-­Sahr conceptualises two modes of adopting a new religion as syncretism and symbolic battle: “Whereas the syncretistic mode uses religious symbolism in a way that underlines the combination of the old and the new, the mode of symbolic battle stresses conflict and uses religious symbolism to demonstrate radical difference” (1999, 353). While the author analyses conversion narratives especially in light of individual biographies and crisis experiences in relation to gender or sexuality, social mobility, or national or ethnic belonging (1999, 2006), I  suggest to utilise the notions of syncretism and symbolic battle in a broader sense in order to shed light on converts’ articulation of former and present lifeworlds and selves, without assuming an experience of crisis in converts’ biographies. As all four memoirs studied in this chapter narrate, in various ways, a moving between discursive realms and lifeworlds, and transformations of the self, I use the notions of syncretism and symbolic battle to analyse the memoirs’ representation of the construction of different lifeworlds and different selves throughout the conversion trajectory.

Women’s stories of conversion to Judaism and Islam This next section engages with four memoirs recently published across Western European contexts. Two of them are women’s stories of conversion to and within Judaism: the 2007 British The Rabbi’s Daughter: A True Story of Sex, Drugs and Orthodoxy by Reva Mann; and the 2009 Dutch memoir Just Jew It: Hoe Ik Joods Werd in 730 Dagen (Just Jew It: How I Became Jewish in 730 Days) by Suzanne van Bokhoven. The other two are women’s stories of conversion to Islam: the 2009 German Von MTV nach Mekka: Wie der Islam Mein Leben Veränderte (From MTV to Mecca: How Islam Inspired My Life) by Kristiane Backer; and the 2008 Flemish memoir Thuis in de Islam (At Home in Islam) by Eva Vergaelen. Especially the memoir by Reva Unterman, who uses the pen name Reva Mann, became well-­known. It was reviewed in British, Israeli, and American newspapers and received media attention,1 and was considered controversial and banned by a few British synagogues (Jardine 2008). Kristiane Backer’s memoir was first published in Germany in 2009, was translated to English and published in the UK in 2012, and was also translated to Dutch (2011), Indonesian (2013), Arabic (unknown), Malay (2014), and Urdu (2015).2 While it is difficult to know how many copies were sold in these different settings, Backer is,

Negotiating transformation and difference 87 as a former MTV presenter and former girlfriend of the Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, a well-­known figure, and for that reason she has been interviewed and has participated in BBC programs, Fox News, and Middle Eastern documentaries about her life, Islam, Muslims, and conversion. She gave extensive book presentations in the UK and abroad.3 Both Mann’s and Backer’s conversion narratives can therefore be thought of as having been repeatedly mentioned and shared through various platforms, and having reached a broad, diverse, and international audience. The memoirs by Suzanne van Bokhoven and Eva Vergaelen are less well known. The first was published in one edition for the Netherlands and Flanders, and is nowadays available in Dutch libraries. The second was written by a critical leftist journalist and activist, which might mean that this conversion narrative is particularly known by people situated in Flemish leftist and pluralist networks and civil society. It is also available in Dutch libraries. While it is hard to estimate the impact of especially less-­known memoirs, I analyse the four memoirs together in order to put the memoirs by Mann and Backer in perspective, and arrive at a broader understanding of women’s conversion stories as laid down in memoirs. All four memoirs narrate the changes and transformations of lifeworlds and selves through conversion. All four authors reflect on their experiences of conversion as women – for example, in relation to gendered changes in lifestyle and/or the negotiation of gendered stereotypes of pious women. This observation about the fact that all memoirs thematise women’s particular perspectives and experiences is no coincidence. Gender and sexuality therefore need to be centrally included as analytical categories in understanding conversion trajectories. Religious studies scholar Eliza Kent (2014) has pointed out that conversion entails much more than a change in worldview or ethos – it often also leads to radical gendered and sexualised transformations. These include the gendered division of labour, gendered roles within the family, kinship, sexual relationships, the organisation and experience of public space, and norms that govern how men and women should speak, dress, and walk. Drawing on these observations, Kent argues for the inclusion of gender as a central analytical category to open up new ways of investigating and understanding the lives of converts (2014, 318). So far, I have reflected on storytelling and the potential politicised dynamics related to conversion and alluded to the differentiating role of gender and sexuality in conversion trajectories and experiences. In what follows, I analyse the memoirs by Mann, van Bokhoven, Backer, and Vergaelen. I look at the motivations for conversion, explore the narrated construction of lifeworlds and selves, and highlight the ways in which the memoirs thematise dominant perceptions on Jews and Muslims in Europe. The analysis will show 1) that the memoirs construct conversion stories from women’s particular vantage point and experience; 2) that the memoirs narrate the negotiation of the ‘double bind’ of conversion in various ways mediated through individual biographies and material bodies; and 3) relatedly, that to come

88  Nella van den Brandt to a social-­political understanding of the narration of individual conversion experience, the storytelling needs to be connected to the differentiated positions of Jews and Muslims in contemporary Europe. Motivations for conversion: between spirituality and community The motivations for conversion for Mann, van Bokhoven, Backer, and Vergaelen include a longing for God, a spiritual quest, and a desire to belong to a well-­defined community of like-­minded people. While all share these motivations, the conversion narratives diverge in their emphasis on either the spiritual or the communal. The desire for community is for Mann and van Bokhoven mediated by their prior different relationships with Judaism and the Jewish people. Mann and van Bokhoven embarked upon two different types of conversion that have a different status in Jewish law: Mann can be considered and identifies herself explicitly as a ‘returnee’/‘ba’alat tshuva’ (Hebrew female form for ‘returnee’). Having always belonged to the Jewish people in a self-­evident manner by being born from a Jewish mother, as a young woman, Mann makes the deliberate decision to strive for a pious life. Van Bokhoven converts to Judaism coming from a non-­Jewish family and background, which is in Hebrew called giyur. This distinction in types of conversion is part of the explanation for the differentiated experiences of Mann and van Bokhoven. Mann seems to prioritise the spiritual and the communal equally. During a performance of the mitzvot of lighting Shabbes candles and reciting the blessings before eating, she experiences the transcendental presence of God. This experience may well explain Mann’s choice for strict Orthodoxy,4 since strictly Orthodox traditions and communities emphasise such (longing for) ecstatic spiritual experiences. But she equally longs for ‘home’ and a sense of security, and decides to join a yeshiva in Jerusalem. “I had exiled myself. Now I am trying to return to the fold” (2007, 12).5 Van Bokhoven takes a more rationalised approach. She repeatedly questions her religiosity: I feel Jewish, but do I also feel that I am a Jew? Do I have a Jewish soul when I  do not want to conform to issues I  cannot agree with on the basis of rational thinking? . . . Coming out in Judaism should be a personal wish, but does this wish need to have a religious basis? (2009, 128–129, translation mine) During her conversion trajectory, van Bokhoven initially prioritises the unity of her family and her role as a mother. Since she married an Israeli Jew, she wonders about the cultural and religious identity of her children, and wants them to be accepted as ‘fully’ Jewish. She expresses a longing to belong to the Jewish people and have her entire family included in that. Mann expresses a similar desire to belong, but in her case this is framed as a ‘returning to the fold’, which denotes the understanding of an already

Negotiating transformation and difference 89 existing bond with Judaism and the Jewish people from which she has strayed. The referred-­to distinction in terms of ‘religion’ versus ‘ethnicity’ is not echoed in the Islamic tradition. However, also when it comes to Islam, it is helpful to take a closer look at the term ‘conversion’. As anthropologist Karin van Nieuwkerk (2014) notes, many converts to Islam prefer to speak about ‘becoming Muslim’, ‘taking shahadah’ (pronouncing the Islamic declaration of faith), or ‘embracing Islam’, which all refer to converts’ sense of a gradual realisation that their ideas were already Islamic even before they consciously turned to Islam. Also Backer narrates her sense of the Islamic precepts being “logical” (2012, 79). Other converts opt for the term ‘reversion’, which denotes the theological-­missionary understanding that ‘all people are born Muslim’. This makes turning to Islam thus a move of returning. In Arabic, there is no word for conversion, but the verb aslama conveys the idea of becoming a Muslim (literally: to submit).6 In her trajectory of what is entitled ‘becoming a Muslim’,7 Backer, a single woman working in German and British show business, is foremost searching for higher meaning in life and for God. She finds this in Islam. Backer’s first encounter with Islam takes place through a romantic partner, Imran Khan. The relationship doesn’t last, however, and Backer embarks upon her spiritual journey from then on alone. Her search for a Muslim like-­minded community is, however, not easy, and she picks and chooses her friends and spiritual guides carefully. Eva Vergaelen describes how she grew up with communist parents and learned to identify with atheism. When she started working as a teacher in ethics at a high school in Antwerp, she encounters Islam for the first time through meeting Muslim children. She is interested in learning more and feels a connection to the Quran. What she calls her ‘intellectual conversion’ seems to just happen by circumstance, not because she was searching for it. As such, Vergaelen explains: “I  wasn’t looking for Islam. Islam found me” (2008, 21). Vergaelen marries an Egyptian Muslim man, and together they raise a daughter. This intimate connection to her Muslim husband is important to nurture her faith and sense of belonging. But apart from that, Vergaelen takes up an individualistic approach to being Muslim and questions various assumptions about where she should (or should not) belong. She explicitly moves at intersections, criticises attitudes of non-­Muslims, Muslims, and fellow female converts alike, and is selective about where she feels at home. Moreover, she criticises the ‘why did you convert?’ question: Why did I choose for Islam? The question itself emerges from the rationalistic dogma. As if I went shopping and considered the advantages and disadvantages. I  did not choose, instead, Allah opened up my heart. I do not believe because of a sense of guilt nor repentance, in Islam this concept does not exist. I believe because of love for purity, the beauty of happiness, the life force that is buzzing in the divine words of the

90  Nella van den Brandt Quran. . . . [F]or the first time in my life, I opened to a power that I did not control. (2008, 28–29, translation mine) Vergaelen prioritises the spiritual elements in her conversion trajectory over the communal. Her experience of the transcendental presence of God trumps her sense of individual agency; God emerges as the primary agentive subject in this conversion story. As such, Vergaelen’s storytelling does not primarily aim at establishing a sense of control and autonomy in the face of transformation (Jackson 2013) – instead, her conversion story is about ‘opening up’ and giving in to shaping an intersubjective relationship with God. Jewish conversion battles and syncretisms These various motivations for conversion can be related to the authors’ biographies (Davidman 1991; van Nieuwkerk 2008). These partly explain the authors’ discourses on past and present lifeworlds and selves that need to be situated on a continuum of scripts of symbolic battle versus syncretism. The formulation of these scripts is often expressed in terms of gender and sometimes sexuality. Moreover, the scripts are experienced through the material body. As will be fleshed out what follows, a conversion trajectory fully involves people’s material bodies, not just their minds or spirits (McGuire 2008, 97–118). On a sliding scale of symbolic battle and syncretic scripts, Mann’s story of conversion resembles the symbolic battle most. Mann strongly desires to belong to a new lifeworld, that of strict Orthodoxy, and she rejects her former way-­of-­being-­in-­the-­world. Connected to that, she rejects her old self and aims at embracing and nurturing a new self. Mann speaks of the need to repent for her sins and of distancing herself from former social contacts (including casual sex) and activities (including partying and drug use). The notion of sin, repentance, and renewal is therefore strongly embodied: Mann’s story of conversion is about shedding her old life and body through repentance and purification, and learning to inhabit a new life and become a new body. Mann explicitly uses secular versus religious terminology to refer to what she considers to be oppositional lifeworlds, and uses this terminology to frame her story of conversion from the start. The distinction in lifeworlds is, in the case of Mann, physical/geographical: her former liberal ‘wild’ life was in London, while her current repentance takes place in Jerusalem. The opening chapter is situated in Jerusalem, where Mann considers her life and desires after her physical move to Israel and her religious move into a girls’ yeshiva: It is scorching hot and I imagine how cooling the Mediterranean waves would feel against my skin. . . . But I know that sunning at the seaside is a pleasure from my old life, the carefree secular existence that I have

Negotiating transformation and difference 91 willingly exchanged for the absolutes of ultra-­Orthodox Jewish doctrine. Now I must keep strictly to the modesty laws and not reveal my body in public. Yet, even though I pray and perform the mitzvot daily, I still find myself longing to wear blue jeans, or worse, a bikini. . . . The more I  read, the more I  feel the Rambam’s treatise [Hilchot Tshuva, Laws of Repentance] has been written especially for me, Reva Mann, atoning for a multitude of sins, yearning to change my past ways and live according to Jewish law. (2007, 1–3) Mann’s story of conversion is formulated in terms of a symbolic battle throughout, positing a radical difference between secular and religious existence. Moreover, the term ‘battle’ can be taken almost literally in Mann’s case, since the story is about her struggles in giving up ‘old ways’ and against illicit desires. While Mann would ideally want to reject her former life and self entirely, she cannot establish a definite break because of family (Mann continues to need to relate to her former lifeworld because of her liberal Jewish parents and her disabled sister in London), and because she does not control her dreams and desires completely (Mann continues longing for both ecstatic spirituality and ecstatic sex). She hopes to solve these issues in finding a perfect husband, who should be pious, a good father, and a great lover. She marries Simcha, whose piety and fatherhood qualities are excellent, but who ultimately disappoints in bed. Sexuality remains throughout the narrative an important challenge as a source of temptation and obstacle in becoming a religious subject (van Klinken 2012), in this case a pious woman. Sexual attraction to the opposite sex is not just a temptation to negotiate: when Mann starts an affair with Joe, it is the ultimate moment of failure in the move away from a former lifeworld and self and the becoming of a new self. Mann narrates this ‘straying from the straight path’ (Beekers and Kloos 2018) as carnal sin that damages the soul and its connection to God: The enormity of what I  have done hits me. Lying next to a panting Joe, I  realise I  do not love this man. I  have sinned for only a transient moment of pleasure. Suddenly I am fearful of the chastisement of koret, excommunication from the divine forever. In his treatise, the Rambam, lists the sins for which there is no repentance. I try to remember if adultery is one of them. I imagine my soul floating in the dark of space, lonely, abandoned, unable to attach itself to God’s light forever, and I tremble in the darkness. I need to know if I have truly been cut off. I say a prayer under my breath ‘Shema Yisroel. . . ’, to test if I can still connect to the divine. I am relieved to find that I can still conjure up an image of God in heaven and of myself as His servant below. (2007, 215–216)

92  Nella van den Brandt Mann’s conversion trajectory is therefore about a constant gendered and sexualised, conflictual, and guilt-­inducing moving back and forth between secular and strictly Orthodox lifeworlds. As such, for Mann, both the secular and the sacred are “vividly real and present through the experiencing body” (McGuire 2008, 13). However, throughout her conversion trajectory, she increasingly learns to negotiate and reconcile her desires for spirituality, security, belonging, and sexuality. She moves away from strict Orthodoxy by not keeping the mitzvot, and she divorces from Simcha and builds a new independent life in which she continues to share with her ex-­husband the care of their three children. Instead of perceiving and experiencing God, family, and community, versus sexuality and an independent life, as belonging to oppositional lifeworlds and selves, towards the end of the memoir, Mann increasingly establishes syncretism. This can be read in her narration of the travel she and her children make to India, where they find a Chabad community they join for the celebration of the holy fest of Succah: As the rabbi continues his discourse, I muse on my complicated relationship to God. I  still believe in Him and His holy Torah, but am unable to follow many of the laws. Like many Jews before me, I live in a spiritual exile. . . . [B]ut tonight, I welcome the opportunity to join in with the festivities, and to share the Sabbath with all these travellers. . . . This is how I must live if I am to find peace, bringing together the holy and the profane, merging them instead of ricocheting from one to the other. (Mann 2007, 324–326) On the other end of the spectrum of symbolic battle and syncretic scripts, we find van Bokhoven’s story of conversion. Her story seems to establish from the beginning a smooth integration of old and new lifeworlds and selves. Van Bokhoven has a steady and valued position in society as a medical professional, mother of two children, and wife of a secular Israeli Jewish engineer. While strict Orthodoxy favours physical, social, and ideological encapsulation (Davidman 1991, 180–184), Dutch Liberal Judaism does not. As such, the tradition and community of Dutch Liberal Judaism may relatively easily welcome a highly educated, professional, and self-­conscious woman like van Bokhoven. Moreover, Dutch Liberal Judaism is, similar to other progressive redefinitions of Judaism (such as Conservative and Reform), relatively open to the possibility of conversion of those with non-­ Jewish mothers in the first place. Van Bokhoven explicitly identifies as ‘a modern Jew’ with ‘down-­to-­earth sense’ (‘gezond verstand’). This means for van Bokhoven that she needs to struggle with harmonising the Halacha with her sense for logic. A  times, she expresses her annoyance about inequalities between men and women she feels she has to negotiate when learning about the Biblical stories and Jewish tradition, and in the everyday life of the Liberal Jewish community. Van Bokhoven does experience the ritualised

Negotiating transformation and difference 93 moment of conversion, after two years of studying Judaism at the Liberal synagogue in Amsterdam, as a ‘turning point’ (Hunt 2005, 26). The way in which she narrates this moment expresses a distinction between her former and present life and self, and at the same time dissolves such a distinction through capturing the former and the present in one word of her own creation: “Dit is het dan: mijn voormalig-­katholiek/atheistisch-­nu-­joods leven” (2009, 187) (“So this is it: my former-­Catholic/Atheist-­now-­Jewish life”). Overall, the match between Dutch Liberal Judaism and van Bokhoven seems to be a fairly good one, which facilitates a syncretic script. Islamic conversion battles and syncretisms Vergaelen’s story of conversion to Islam can be put somewhere in the middle between symbolic battle and syncretic scripts about lifeworlds and selves. Vergaelen does not reject in a one-­sided manner her former lifeworld and does not uncritically accept or embrace new forms of community or belonging. Her search for a faith and way of life that suits her is individualised and also takes place through her connection to her husband. She expresses fierce critique vis-­à-­vis the Islamophobia of mainstream society as well as Muslims she considers narrow-­minded regarding notions of ‘Islam’ and ‘women’s role and position’. As such, Vergaelen’s conscious targeting of various audiences (Cooke 2000) is infused by notions of women’s specificities and emancipation. One of the chapters of her story of conversion is even entitled ‘The Woman’, and this quote sums up Vergaelen’s point of view on women’s specificity and individuality: “The crux of emancipation is one’s individual right to define it. And [it] is not feeling guilty about being woman in everyday life” (2007, 207). At the same time, the author refrains from essentialising former and current lifeworlds and selves. In some ways, Backer’s memoir is more of a symbolic battle conversion script. When it comes to lifeworlds, Backer narrates her experience of an opposition between the world of show business and an Islamic way of life. Backer made a career in German and later British media and show business, and she became a well-­known VJ of MTV during the early 1990s. She emphasises that working for MTV in London “wasn’t just a job, but a way of life” (2012, 43). She is excited about MTV life, but after a couple of years, it also wears her down, and she feels depressed and lonely. Her first encounter with Islam and Muslims takes place through her romantic partner Imran Khan, with whom she travels to Pakistan, where he talks a lot about what he considers Islam and Eastern culture. Backer starts her story with this travel as a way of framing conversion in both religious as well as cultural terms as entering a ‘new world’, which she distinguishes from her MTV life: I felt my excitement grow at the prospect of getting to know both the country and its people. It didn’t occur to me that diving into a world so

94  Nella van den Brandt different from the exciting life I was leading in August 1992 would have momentous consequences. (2012, 4, emphasis added) Backer contrasts MTV life with Islamic Pakistani culture. Her dissatisfaction with her MTV professional and social lifeworld grows, and she feels that Islam is logical and inspiring. The following years, Backer needs to negotiate her job in show business and her social circle with her growing Muslim faith and being-­in-­the-­world. This opposition between lifeworlds is not absolute though: Backer at times finds opportunities to collaborate with Muslim artists and to do philanthropic projects that seem more close to what she deems important, and she continues some old friendships. Moreover, Backer does not narrate an opposition between former and current selves: instead, she experiences to be somewhat of an ‘outsider within’ in the world of show business, while Islam ‘suits’ her from the beginning. As also Mossiere points out, converts to Islam in Western contexts often were already occupying a hybrid space, or were experiencing marginality even before their conversion (2012, 101–103). As such, embracing Islam can mean “claiming affiliation to a liminal space that allows . . . to navigate between different universes” (2012, 103). At the same time, Backer’s story of conversion is an elaborate narration of her desire and actions to transform herself – and this subject-­ formation (Mahmood 2005) takes place through nurturing her Islamic self, learning about Islam from friends and Sufi guides, versing herself in Islamic practices such as prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage, and engaging in Sufi communities. Backer does not uncritically embrace all types of Islam and does not endorse all Muslim opinions and communities she encounters. Instead, she carefully searches for suitable guides and a Sufi community in which she feels at home. She criticises majority society and its stereotypical renderings of Islam and Muslims, as well as young British Muslims, whom she finds often too conservative. Her position is therefore not one of easy belonging, but rather one of in-­betweenness. Similar to Vergaelen, she criticises multiple audiences. But whereas Vergaelen embraces a rather individualistic-­ romantic approach to faith, Backer is more inclined to search for a spiritual community in which she can feel nurtured, inspired, and at home. At the end of the memoir, Backer formulates a syncretic script of lifeworlds, explicitly merging different lifeworlds and identities, but without dissolving differences altogether: I feel that it is only now, after a long and challenging integrative process, that my private and professional life, my Muslim and my Western identity are in harmony with one another. I carry both worlds in me and it is my wish to live and express both and mediate between them. (2012, 400)

Negotiating transformation and difference 95 Despite the wish to occupy such a hybrid location, this is not made easy for contemporary women converting to Islam. Both Vergaelen and Backer are compelled to ‘talk back’ (van den Brandt 2019) to prejudices about Islam and Muslims, to Muslim opinions and practices they deem incorrect and harmful, and at times to fellow converts they consider overly conservative. As such, they are engaged in what literary studies scholar Miriam Cooke (2000) has dubbed ‘multiple critique’ in order to contest multiple forms of marginalisation and silence, and as such “initiate new forms of conversations across what were previously thought to be unbridgeable chasms” (2000, 99). But before Backer ends her memoir with hopeful notes on the opportunities for, and future of, what she dubs ‘European Muslims’, and with her reflections on her 17-­year trajectory on the path of Islam, she narrates about her second marriage that unfortunately ends in disaster and suffering. This episode in Backer’s story of conversion is a narration of a symbolic battle of gendered and sexualised lifeworlds from the explicit viewpoint and experience of a convert: Backer feels that ‘as a convert’ (2012, 347; 355) she should learn to inhabit the position of a ‘good Muslim wife’ (2012, 347). Despite warnings and worries of her parents and Muslim and non-­Muslim friends, this means for Backer that she needs to appreciate ‘Moroccan’ and ‘Arabic’ culture, become subservient, and comply with her husband’s wish to practice full gender segregation wherever she is – i.e. refraining from any contact with men. Her husband’s lack of trust and need to control every aspect of her life eventually leads Backer to become isolated and feel suffocated and lonely. Finally, her husband divorces her, and Backer finds herself alone and devastated. Writing about this episode of her life, Backer reflects on it as such: I had wanted to submit to God and please him by fulfilling the wishes of my ex-­husband. In reality, however, I hadn’t surrendered to God but to a man whose interpretation of Islam was very different from mine. His way to God was not mine. His interpretation of the religion had become a means of control and even oppression, maybe also because he feared he would lose me. As a result, I lost some of my friends, my job and even my own self. In the long run, it could never have worked. For love to be nurtured and grow, it needs trust and freedom (within God’s limits). (2012, 358–359) Backer repeatedly stresses her position as a ‘convert’ and her ex-­husband’s as a ‘born Muslim’. In this hierarchically envisioned relationship, she tried to learn to embody his ideal of a Muslim wife. He became “my king” (2012, 348) and she “a sheltered virgin who had never much contact with the outside world” (2012, 353). Backer describes these efforts as destined to fail, since they imply a lifeworld and self that “wasn’t me and I  could never become that person” (2012, 353). In this episode of Backer’s story

96  Nella van den Brandt of conversion, we see an emergent notion of clashing selves resulting in the failure of becoming a certain type of woman inhabiting a lifeworld of her husband’s making. Backer interprets this failure as eventually for the better, and concludes the chapter ‘Marriage’ with talking about how she learnt that “[h]uman beings will always disappoint. But God is there” (2012, 364). This story of conversion exemplifies the “process of trial and error surrounding the project of becoming Muslim” (Mossiere 2016, 103), and is in that sense similar to Revan Mann’s ‘trial and error’ story of becoming strictly Orthodox.

The politics of conversion to Judaism and Islam in Western Europe So far, I explored women’s conversion memoirs and compared the experiences of women turning to Judaism and Islam. I investigated the multiple conversion motivations presented by the narratives and looked into the variety of ways in which understandings of former and current lifeworlds and different versions of the self are constructed on a continuum of syncretic versus symbolic battle scripts. These empirical insights shed light on conversion stories as situated in a complex terrain of multiple dimensions of political-­ social and religious belonging, and gendered and religious experience. In this terrain, stories of conversion formulate notions of self, change, tradition, and community, which reproduce and/or negotiate with or subvert existing dominant discourses and expectations. In this concluding section, I connect these insights to a further reflection on the gendered and culturalised/racialised politics of conversion to Judaism and Islam as expressed by the discussed memoirs. As anthropologist Willy Jansen puts it, both conversion and gender are contested concepts, and conversion has a gendered political dimension, “whether intended by the convert or not” (2006, ix). Since conversion is often considered a confrontation between two religions or worldviews, conversion is perceived differently by the receiving and the departed community. In order to understand the potential impact of such a confrontation, power relations between the communities at stake need to be taken into account (Jansen 2006, x). Furthermore, at stake in stories of conversion, and their reception by others, is a gendered notion of subjectivity. While men are considered autonomous beings with full capacity to make independent religious choices, women are more often expected to be social and relational beings, which circumscribes the choices they are entitled to make (Jansen 2006, x). As sociologist Nira Yuval-­Davis (1997) famously argues, women’s bodies often symbolise the nation, and nationalist rhetoric and projects expect women to reproduce national culture and citizenship. In the context of conversion, therefore, “not only are women given less voice and autonomy in deciding about their religion, but also the protection of religious boundaries takes on a specific gendered character” (Jansen 2006, xi).

Negotiating transformation and difference 97 Drawing on this chapter’s theoretical excursion and empirical analysis, I  argue that conversion to minoritised religious traditions in Europe is an intrinsically politicised move – albeit differently experienced for converts to Judaism and Islam due to diverging geopolitical constellations and constructions of gender and ‘race’/ethnicity. All women narrate their encounters with the question of why they turned to Judaism and Islam. But whereas Mann and van Bokhoven experience this question as only being posed by close family members and friends, Backer and Vergaelen explicitly address their memoirs to an imaginary readership whom they expect to harbour negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslim women. Mann is the only one who moved within the spectrum of Jewish traditions and the only one describing her trajectory and struggles in secular versus religion terminology. Van Bokhoven, Backer, and Vergaelen all became new members of Jewish and Islamic traditions and communities, and therefore need to be able to explain not only why they became religious but also to defend their turn to another religious tradition and community. In one particular chapter, Bokhoven narrates her experience with anti-­Semitic prejudice and violence. When she steps outside of her home, one early morning to get the children to school and travel to work, she is terrified to see a star of David scraped on her frost-­bitten car window. How do they know Jews (in the making) live in this house? I suddenly feel very unsafe. . . . The menorah chandler should not have been standing at the windowsill! . . . Antisemitism is now a word I can feel. (2006, 78–79, translation mine) On the basis of this episode, Van Bokhoven questions her own formerly held assumptions about Dutch liberalism and tolerance. The turn to Islam by Backer and Vergaelen seems to be contested on a more structural basis, as their narrative is permeated by a wish to talk back to common assumptions about Islam and Muslims and their engagement with multiple critique. As shown earlier, Vergaelen explicitly moves at intersections, criticising the attitudes of non-­Muslims, Muslims, and fellow converts alike. She also criticises assumptions she considers underlying the ‘why did you convert?’ question. As such, the memoir reveals that the storyteller often encounters this question, and therefore expects her readers to have the same question and the same assumptions tied to it. Backer is similarly engaged in multiple critique. However, her narrative also conveys a notion of ambassadorship. The title of the chapter ‘Coming Out as a European Muslim’ draws on a notion of an invisible identity made visible, in the same way LGBTQ persons are expected to have to reveal the secret of their deviant gender and sexual identity and experience.8 The chapter elaborates on the phenomenon of Islamophobia and speaks out against prejudices, which the storyteller knows through experience. Backer labels Muslims in Europe, herself and fellow converts included, as ‘European Muslims’, and identifies for all the task of being ambassadors of Islam: “we are all ultimately ambassadors of Islam. And we need to reach out

98  Nella van den Brandt and engage in the best possible manner, whatever the occasion” (2012, 377). The inclusion of the notion of ambassadorship in a broader strategy of countering negative stereotypes charges those who suffer prejudice and discrimination with a representational burden. Initially a convert strategy, it is now widely shared with born Muslim women and, according to social historian Margaretha van Es, while this ambassadorial role “may seem to be an effective and accessible strategy, it entails a form of self-­essentialization where almost all aspects of everyday life become politicized” (2017, 15). Situating women’s conversion stories in a larger Western European political and societal context in which Judaism has in recent decades moved from the position of the culturalised/racialised Other to being accepted as a ‘religion’ among others with its own liberal, conservative, and fundamentalist factions, explains why van Bokhoven needs to negotiate her father’s general atheist ambivalence about religion, while Mann needs to argue against her parents’ framing of her conversion in terms of the image of the ungrateful daughter, downward social mobility, and strict Orthodoxy as an improper Jewish faction: After all the sacrifices we’ve made, the elocution lessons, exorbitant school fees, the nose job  – is this our reward, having you wear that dowdy dress and mumbling prayers all the time? . . . They look like a bunch of freaks. . . . An embarrassment to Judaism. (2007, 87; 109) While some types of Judaism may raise secular, liberal, and middle-­class eyebrows, Islam and Muslims are often homogenised and essentialised into complete difference and non-­Europeanness. In this dynamic, the perceived oppression of Muslim women by Muslim men and Islamic tradition gets “framed as the specific way in which Muslim backwardness and alienness reveal itself” (Farris 2014, 304). The perceived non-­Europeanness of Islam and Muslims, and the role gender plays in the construction of ethnic and religious boundaries, explains the in-­between position Backer and Vergaelen find themselves in. Their engagement in multiple critique and ambassadorship reveals the agency of female converts to Islam in negotiating and countering this in-­between position, but at the same time the difficulty – or sheer impossibility – of escaping the unequal power relations in which (new) Muslims in Europe find themselves.

Notes 1 See for a number of examples of reviews and interviews, Reva Mann’s own webpage: https://revamann.wordpress.com/, last accessed: 19 April 2019. 2 See for a list of these different translations: www.goodreads.com/work/editions/ 21654337-­from-­mtv-­to-­mecca-­how-­islam-­inspired-­my-­life, last accessed: 19 April 2019. In this article, I used the English translation From MTV to Mecca: How Islam Inspired My Life (2012) as material for my analysis. 3 http://kristianebacker.com/, last accessed: 19 April 2019.

Negotiating transformation and difference 99 4 In recent years, various labels and self-­labels have come to replace what has often been called ‘ultra-­Orthodox Jewry’. Some scholars argue that the label ‘ultra-­ Orthodox’ is a construction by outsiders rather than a native concept and find the term Haredi or Hasedim more appropriate. However, not all contemporary traditionalist or strictly orthodox Jews identify as Haredi or Hasidic, partly because of the specific histories of various groups. See Longman (2004) for an overview of the discussion about labels and their genealogies. While Mann structurally refers to ‘ultra-­Orthodoxy’ (as some of the quotes from the memoir show), I decided to refrain from this label given its pejorative connotations and follow Longman (2004) in her choice to use ‘strictly Orthodox’ as a seemingly more adequate descriptive designation. 5 Interestingly, Mann compares her position of ‘returnee’ to that of one of her study partners in the yeshiva, Dvora, who was born into a Welsh Catholic family and converted to Judaism: “Even though I am on a similar quest, I am different from her and other [such] girls. . . . I am the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, the granddaughter of a rabbi who was Chief Rabbi of Israel. The religious world is familiar to me. I already know that only an animal that chews the cud and has cloven hoofs is kosher and that’s why pork is forbidden. I know that Jews can only eat fish that have both fins and scales. I know how to read Hebrew and recite the prayers by heart. Yet I am also learning that there is far more to this world than I was aware of. I certainly never imagined the intensity of the spiritual pursuit of holiness. . . . I always thought that my father’s approach of straddling both the secular and the religious worlds and integrating contemporary concepts with ancient customs was the Jewish way. But here at the yeshiva this kind of synthesis is frowned upon, as the ultra-­Orthodox believe any outside influences will contaminate their carefully circumscribed and protected world.” (2007, 4–5) Mann’s family history and knowledge of Judaism are an asset when integrating in yeshiva life. At the same time, her status as a returnee affords her a specific position vis-­à-­vis those born into strictly Orthodox communities. Mann narrates how being returnee hampers her search for a strictly Orthodox spouse, limiting her to marry a male fellow returnee. “I  know that as a ba’alat tshuva myself, I  am damaged goods in the Orthodox world. . . . I cannot join the ranks of the FFBs, frum (religious) from birth. . . . They will take into account that I am not a virgin, that I have eaten non-­kosher foods and immersed myself in an impure world, and even the fact that I am a rabbi’s daughter will not outweigh those negatives” (2007, 58). 6 See van Nieuwkerk (2014) for a discussion of the term ‘conversion’ in relation to Islam. 7 Chapter 7, in which Backer narrates her ‘official’ conversion through pronouncing the Islamic declaration of faith, is entitled: ‘Becoming a Muslim’. 8 This notion of converts having to ‘come out as Muslim’ reveals the discursive intersection of issues of religious freedom and sexual freedom. From that perspective, it is interesting to note that anthropologist Esra Özyürek has conceptualised Islamophobia in terms of its similarity to homophobia – both seem to rely on, and reinforce, an underlying concept of ‘choice’. An understanding of ‘choice’ informs both Islamophobic and homophobic discourses that treat lesbians and gays, and converts to Islam, as responsible for having ‘chosen’ a lifestyle in which they find themselves discriminated against, and thus as undeserving of legal protection (2015, 8–13).

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Negotiating transformation and difference 101 Mock-­Degen, Minny. 2009. The Dynamics of Becoming Orthodox: Dutch Jewish Women Returning to Judaism and How Their Mothers Felt About It. Amsterdam: Amphora Books. Mossiere, Geraldine. 2016. “The Intimate and the Stranger: Approaching the ‘Muslim Question’ Through the Eyes of Female Converts to Islam.” Critical Research on Religion 4 (1): 90–108. Özyürek, Esra. 2015. Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Plummer, Kenneth. 1995. Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds. London: Routledge. Taylor, Charles. 1992. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Bokhoven, Suzanne. 2009. Just Jew It: Hoe Ik Joods Werd in 730 Dagen. Amsterdam: Artemis & Co. Van Es, Margaretha A. 2017. “Muslim Women as ‘Ambassadors’ of Islam: Breaking Stereotypes in Everyday Life.” Identities 26 (4): 375–392. Van Klinken, Adriaan. 2012. “Men in the Remaking: Conversion Narratives and Born-­Again Masculinity in Zambia.” Journal of Religion in Africa 42 (3): 215–239. Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. 2006. “Gender and Conversion to Islam in the West.” In Women Embracing Islam: Gender and Conversion in the West, edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk, 1–16. Austin: University of Texas Press. Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. 2008. “Biography and Choice: Female Converts to Islam in the Netherlands.” Islam and Christian – Muslim Relations 19 (4): 431–447. Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. 2014. “ ‘Conversion’ to Islam and the Construction of a Pious Self.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, edited by Lewis R. Rambo, and Charles E. Farhadian, 667–686. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Van den Brandt, Nella. 2019. “ ‘The Muslim Question’ and Muslim Women Talking Back.” Journal of Muslims in Europe 8 (3): 286–312. Vergaelen, Eva. 2008. Thuis in de Islam. Antwerpen: Meulenhoff Manteau. Viswanathan, Gauri. 1998. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wohlrab-­Sahr, Monika. 1999. “Conversion to Islam: Between Syncretism and Symbolic Battle.” Social Compass 46 (3): 351–362. Wohlrab-­Sahr, Monika. 2006. “Symbolizing Distance: Conversion to Islam in Germany and the United States.” In Women Embracing Islam: Gender and Conversion in the West, edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk, 71–92. Austin: University of Texas Press. Yuval-­Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications.

5 Embodying transformation Religious and gender transitions in Jewish autobiography Mariecke van den Berg

Introduction What do the phenomena of transgender transition and religious conversion have in common? At least one thing: both forms of transition increasingly seem to become the object of public fascination. Television programs, newspaper articles, and online documentaries make visible and intelligible the often bumpy trajectories of transgender people and religious converts in their quest for new (sometimes experienced as, in fact, old) selves. I suggest that the public fascination with personal transition lies, apart from the rather commonplace interest in that which is out of the ordinary, with a paradox that is implied in these narratives. On the one hand, gender transitioners and converts challenge social assumptions of religious and/or gender identity as fixed in biology, birth, and upbringing. Transgender people who transition implicitly or explicitly question the ‘natural’ ties between sex and gender, showing how both are constructed realities that may be subject to change (Keegan 2013, 1). Religious converts show how growing up in a particular social context does not necessarily predict a continuity in individual beliefs and practices (Engelke 2004). Narratives of gender and religious transitions are therefore unsettling, challenging, and sometimes even ‘queer’, challenging dominant understandings of gender and sexuality. On the other hand, narratives of transformation (especially the ones made available to the wider public) often confirm dominant frames of modernity and secular scripts of emancipation. These are stories about personal development, progression, and ‘just being yourself’. In that sense, their narratives comfortably resonate with modern Western values of autonomy and authenticity. In this chapter I explore contemporary narratives of embodied transformation by drawing parallels between narratives of transgender1 transition and religious conversion. I  investigate how narratives of gender and religious transformation both affirm and challenge understandings of gender, religion, and secularity. I  will do so by discussing two recently published autobiographies that focus on gender and religious transformation in the context of Judaism: Uncovered (2015) by Leah Lax and Through the Door

Embodying transformation 103 of Life (2012) by Joy Ladin. In the following section, I first discuss dominant questions posed by transgender studies and conversion studies, arguing that these two ‘fields of the study of human transformation’ can benefit from a mutual dialogue. I then expand on the particularities of the genre of autobiography and its role in the recent public histories of transgender individuals and converts. I  consequently discuss the two aforementioned biographies to illustrate how a perspective of embodied transformation can uncover the potential of conversion and transgender transition as a form of cultural critique.

Transgender studies and conversion studies: suggestions for dialogue In the social study of human transitions, it is helpful to bring into dialogue prominent questions from the fields of transgender studies and conversion studies, both being important interdisciplinary fields for the study of subjects in transformation. These questions partly overlap but also bring to the table specific concerns that can deepen our understanding of the complexities of transformation. It would be impossible to cover both fields of study in-­depth here, but I would like to present briefly what I find to be the most valuable questions being asked in both fields, and comment upon the benefits I see when these sets of questions are brought together. The relatively young field of transgender studies has, from its very beginning, been a field that takes an overt interest in transformation, both that of transgendered persons and the transformation of society into a trans-­ inclusive space. In particular, trans studies has stakes in liberating trans persons from psychology and medical science, which for a long time have held the definitional power over who is an ‘authentic’ trans person ‘entitled’ to gender-­confirming treatment. Trans studies’ most prominent pioneers are scholars who take the experience of transitioning as an important epistemological starting point in their analyses of trans lives, representations, and inclusivity. Important questions regarding transition are, for instance: what does it mean to be ‘passable’ or to feel that this is expected by society (Tamás-­Fütty 2010; Billard 2019)? What happens to old selves? If upon transition narratives and material traces of old selves can potentially ‘out’ a person, how does one relate to the stories, photographs, objects, and clothes that make up one’s personal history from before transition (Stone 1991 [1987])? However, the field has also been wary of narrow conceptions of transgender experience as necessarily related to transitioning. Like queer theory, trans studies is also the critical study and deconstruction of gender categories themselves. However, unlike queer theory, trans studies is constantly negotiating between the necessity to deconstruct imposed gender norms and acknowledge the productive function of a variety of gender identities. Though partly a study of transition, then, transgender studies takes this very moment of movement as an occasion for a critique on the ‘realness’

104  Mariecke van den Berg of categories of male and female (Stryker 2006, 3). Trans studies therefore asks questions that move beyond transition: how can we think about in-­ betweenness, fluidity, and porous borders when it comes to gender (Davis 2009; Nordmarken 2014)? How may trans studies contribute to the social acceptance of non-­binary and/or gender queer people (Richards et al. 2016)? Importantly, transgender studies asks necessary questions about the body. It wants to uncover the many ways in which social norms are imprinted upon bodies (Stryker 2006, 3), as well as how gendered norms always need to be understood from an intersectional perspective that also takes into account norms of sexuality, race, class, age, and ability (Roen 2001; Hines 2010; De Vries 2012). Finally, transgender studies also criticises, and wants to avoid reproducing, an ‘unhealthy’ fascination with transgender bodies within public discourse, critiquing for instance the objectification of transgender bodies in film (Keegan 2013; Ramnehill 2016; Steinbock 2016). The mere fact that bodies are brought into the analysis does not automatically generate better scholarship: it matters how bodies are being discussed and whose body is at the (constant) focus of attention. The field of conversion studies has a much longer history than transgender studies, ‘convert’ being a considerably older subject position than the more modern ‘transgender’ and its predecessor ‘transsexual’. The origins of conversion studies are often located in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Arthur Darby Nock’s Conversion (1933). Both works reflect the assumptions of the Protestant pietistic tradition, understanding conversion as a radical shift of a predominantly psychological nature (Rambo and Farhadian 2014, 5). More recent work on conversion, however, has criticised the limitations of this exclusively Christian/ Protestant perspective and complemented it with other religious and disciplinary foci. Rambo and Farhadian, in their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, list seven shifts in the study of conversion, which I will here rephrase into questions about religious transformation (2014, 7–8). First, instead of focusing on radical breaks, what are the continuities between previous and ‘new’ religious and spiritual orientations? Second, where can the agency of converts be located? Third, how can we understand the complexities of the motivations for conversion, including non-­religious motivations? Fourth, how can we understand the importance of narrative, of the performativity of the telling of the self, in the study of conversion? Fifth, what is the significance of the human body and material dimensions in conversion? Sixth, what can we learn from viewing conversion as a process or ‘career’? And seventh, how can we develop an historical perspective on conversion? The developments noted by Rambo and Farhadian indicate a larger shift from the study of conversion as an interesting but in itself neutral process, to what Judith M. Lieu has termed the ‘politics of conversion’ (1998). For Lieu, this implied a study of the stakes involved in portraying women as being particularly prone to converting in early Christianity. The politics of conversion,

Embodying transformation 105 however, can be defined more broadly in the sense that the study of conversion should include questions about how power relations are involved in religious transformations. What is at stake for converts, communities, and societies at large? How is conversion related to dominant ideologies of gender, race, class, and nationality (e.g. Van Klinken 2012; Kent 2014; Özyürek 2014; Jensen 2006)? How do processes of conversion and mission in Europe’s colonial past relate to (post)colonial religious agency (e.g. van der Veer 1996; Viswanathan 1998; Roberts 2012)? As such, conversion studies is shown to have the potential of taking conversion as a point of departure for cultural critique. Religious transitioning can lay bare the borders that some want to maintain and the power that is involved in keeping categories alive. Transgender studies and conversion studies have quite a few commonalities. Both have had to break away from the imperatives of psychology as the dominant frame for the understanding human transformation. Both have, or have taken, an interest in transformation as a socially, culturally, and politically embedded, embodied, and material process that raises important questions about how gender, religion, and secularity, but also race and nationality, are unstable categories of identity. Both have also developed a sensitivity toward what Anthony Giddens (1991, 54) has described as a ‘fragile self’: a self that needs more explaining, more legitimating, than other selves that come across as more self-­evident. There are, however, also some important differences. In the context of Western Europe, and many other contexts for that matter, transgender persons form a minority. The same need not be said for converts: people can convert to a majority religion or ‘deconvert’ to become part of a predominantly secular context. There are, therefore, some things the study of conversion can take from transgender studies. First, posing political questions and focusing on issues of emancipation and social justice has formed an integral part of transgender studies much longer than it has of conversion studies, and transgender studies therefore has an extensive conceptual toolbox at its disposal for thinking through the politics of transformation. Second, transgender studies has not only focused on the lived realities of transgender persons, but has also invested in a much more developed study of the representation of transgender persons in public discourse and popular culture. As of yet, this focus seems to be underrepresented in conversion studies, which often takes the lived experiences of converts as its point of departure (for an exception, see Van den Brandt 2019; Spoliar and van den Brandt forthcoming). Third, transgender studies is better equipped to ask questions about the liminality of transition. While conversion studies has made a shift from conceiving conversion in terms of a radical break to processes and gradual changes, this has as of yet not lead to an extensive study of the possibility of liminal subjectivities. Vice versa, transgender studies will benefit from the questions asked by conversion studies. Though the latter has recently taken up the challenge of making the study of conversion more political, conversion

106  Mariecke van den Berg studies does offer the tools to investigate the more spiritual and existential dimensions of human transformation.

Transformation, autobiography, and body Many of the concerns from transgender studies and conversion studies become relevant in the study of autobiography, which is the preeminent genre for narrating human transformation. Both converts and gender transitioners have made ample use of the genre of autobiography in order to share their experiences, though with different motives. In the context of Christianity, many converts chose to write down their experiences in the form of autobiography in order to legitimise their personal transition, but also in order to produce a text that could then be used for evangelising purposes (Hindmarsh 2005). In the study of conversion, the act of telling the story of conversion has come to be seen as an integral part of the conversion trajectory itself. David Snow and Richard Machalek, for instance, speak of conversion as a form of ‘biographical reconstruction’ in which “some aspects of the past are jettisoned, others are redefined, and some are put together in ways previously inconceivable” (1983, 267 in Gooren 2007, 343). Bruce Hindmarsh (2014) suggests that the ‘second conversion’, that of experience into text, might be even more important than the initial conversion experience. Autobiography, according to Hindmarsh, is always already a transition narrative in the sense that it reflects the classical plot of a transformation story told through a beginning, middle, and end (2014, 346). Yet, in practice, conversion narratives are more complex than merely following fixed narrative rules: “[a] conversion narrative can be formulaic but more often there is a creative interaction with religious codes” (2014, 348). It is this tension between on the one hand fixing one’s story in the narrative rules that make it intelligible, and on the other hand the narrative space for negotiation (not just with religious codes, but also with codes of gender), that is important to keep in mind in this chapter, because I am interested in the room for manoeuvre in transition narratives. For transgender persons, too, autobiography has been an important genre of self-­expression. Reid Lodge (2017) distinguishes three waves of transgender autobiography in which trans authors had different purposes for sharing their personal stories in this manner. During the first wave, starting with the stories of transgender individuals, who in the 1930s to the 1950s were the first to undergo gender-­confirming surgery, autobiography served the apologetic purpose of ‘humanising’ transgender people and making them ‘respectable’. In emphasising the perils of their old lives, as well as the joy of their new lives, trans authors hoped for the empathy of the audience and a position of ‘respectability’. The second wave (starting in the 1960s) was characterised by growing networks of trans women and, from the 1980s onward, also trans men, who in their autobiographies maintained the conception of gender transitioning as a quest with a positive outcome,

Embodying transformation 107 but showed themselves to be more critical to the dominance of medical discourse in the speaking of transgender issues. The third wave, finally, marked by the growing influence of the internet and online activities, makes less use of the traditional printed autobiography but turns to blogs. This has consequences for how the ‘story of transition’ is told: rather than looking back on an apparently finalised trajectory and a coherent self, transgender people narrate the doubts, frustrations, and joys of their daily lives. In blogs, then, transition is less ‘closed off’. There are, as also Leland Spencer (2015, 2019) has observed, striking similarities between the coming-­out stories of queer people and those of converts. In public discourse, transgender narratives in particular seem almost obliged to be a variation on what Holte (1992) distinguished as the specific Protestant conversion plot of a previous life of sin, the conversion experience itself, and then life after the conversion. In order for transgender people to be acknowledged, their stories need to contain a similar narrative recipe of ‘success’: they are expected to have experienced a previous life of despair, gone through a painful but rewarding transformation process, to then be ‘passable’ and happy (Van den Berg and Marinus 2017). Trans theorist Jay Prosser (1998), moreover, connects the notion of submission to God/the Sacred present in conversion stories to transgender persons’ submission to medical expertise in ‘classical’ transsexual autobiographies. As Prosser explains, transsexuals “must be arch storytellers” (113) who, by their “confession”, may convince the medical professionals, whom Prosser refers to as “half-­priests”, to grant them the “salvation” of gender-­affirming surgery (111). Prosser here seems to resort to religious (Christian) language to uncover a problematic aspect of trans storytelling, namely the fact that these stories are told against a backdrop of unequal power relations between trans people in need of medical treatment and medical professionals who may or may not grant them this treatment. Certain theological elements, then, seep into coming-­out narratives that use the traditional conversion plot, as also Leland Spencer argues (2019, 22). This theological ‘spilling over’ is important to notice, because it draws our attention to the spiritual dimension of transitioning. In the context of the Netherlands, individuals who undergo a gender transition experience this transformation as, besides an embodied, psychological, and social process, also a spiritual endeavour which raises important existential questions (Beckman and Van den Berg 2018). However, the theological residue of the coming-­out narratives also points to more problematic sides of this plot, namely the supposed ‘sinfulness’ of being in the closet and consequently the moral imperative of queer visibility (Spencer 2015, 2019). One could argue vice versa that conversion stories are likely also stories of gender transformation. Studies of conversion show how conversion is often ‘mediated’ through gendered practices (Davidman and Greil 1993; Van Klinken 2012). Upon conversion, converts learn how to perform masculinity and femininity according to the religious scripts of their new

108  Mariecke van den Berg communities. In Judaism, which is the focus of this chapter, the ritual of conversion is already clearly gendered: while both men and women are expected to visit the mikvah, the ritual bath, men are requested also to be circumcised. Moreover, after the official conversion ritual itself, depending on the denomination one converted to, daily rituals and practices are separated more or less according to gender. In other words, the new subject-­position that converts now ‘inhabit’ is partly made possible by gender. Building on the questions posed in the previous section, in this chapter I am particularly interested in how current narratives of personal transformation are embodied. Whether caused by Platonic (Neuman 1994; Durán 2005) or Christian (Stuart 2009) ideals of subjectivity as predominantly a matter of the mind, autobiography has long been able to present itself as a particularly disembodied genre. Over recent years, however, more attention is paid to the role of the body in life writing. As Christopher Stuart argues, there is an increase in literature produced by those whose bodies have long been ignored in autobiography, and we are now witnessing a “resurrection of the body” in this genre (2009, 10). For several reasons, bringing the body into focus when writing and studying autobiography is an important intervention. First, a focus on embodied transition enables a more thorough description and understanding of pivotal moments of change. It demonstrates that personal transformation cannot be reduced to an abstract process of adopting or shedding ideas. Rather than merely asking questions about shifting beliefs, the question should be raised as to what transition looks, smells, feels, tastes, and sounds like. Second, following Isabel Durán (2005), we can take the body as a point of departure for cultural critique. In her analysis of female, gay, and non-­white autobiography, Durán points to the fact that precisely those non-­normative bodies that have long been excluded from autobiography are able to “speak out on issues that have, for a long time, been considered private or even shameful, and to insist on being heard” (47). Autobiography from the perspective of non-­normative bodies, then, can disclose the pain of rejection and invisibility. Moreover, it can open up the possibility of thinking about the “fractured selves” that result from these processes of exclusion (50). Embodied autobiography can be a site to expose locations and effects of cultural abjection: “sexual taboos, prisons, disease wards, freak shows, anything that threatens to confront the leakiness of order and other, the liminal, the borderline, that which defines what is fully human from what is not” (51). Rather than striving for neat and coherent stories of the self, autobiography can be a place where the abject is recognised as “a constitutive part of the subject” (57). In order for autobiography to become a source for the study of exclusion and silencing, we need an approach that shifts the focus from coherency to inconsistency, from completed narratives of the self to ongoing storytelling, and from abstract ideas to embodied life.

Embodying transformation 109

Gender and religious transition in Jewish autobiography In this section I  discuss the autobiographies of two Jewish women who, in the context of the United States, both narrate important gendered and religious transitions in their lives. There are several reasons why I focus on Judaism and on the context of the United States. Jewish identity in itself is heterogeneous and is the subject and (always preliminary) outcome of a history of many religious, cultural, and ethnic transitions (Stratton 2000; Boyarin 2009; Broyde and Goldfeder 2014). It is interesting, for instance, to note that Rabbinic discussions on conversion (its desirability and legal prerequisites) have played an important role in defining both the theological as well as the ethnic boundaries between those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’ (Porton 1994). Moreover, Judaism historically recognised also more liminal categories such as that of proselytes and, interestingly, ‘God-­ fearers’: individuals who lived Jewish lives but who were not expected to convert (Segal 2014). As will become clear from the following discussion, the two authors relate in their own way to what they consider to be the ethnical, theological, and material building blocks of Jewish identity and to the question of where to localise the dividing line between ‘in’ or ‘out’. The focus on the United States in this chapter might be odd in a volume that discussed ‘bodies in transformation’ in the context of Europe. The most important reason is that when one wants to explore gendered and religious transformations in the context of Judaism, more material is available in the United States, where trans issues are increasingly being discussed in Jewish communities and trans Jewish Studies is being developed (for instance, by scholars like Max Strassfeld and Noach Dzmura). The two authors that are discussed here have in common that they are both born in Jewish families. This does not mean, however, that they do not undergo religious transformations. Leah Lax’s story is that of moving from Reform/secular Judaism to Hasidism and then away, a trajectory that resembles Karin van Nieuwkerk’s perspective on (Muslim) conversion as a ‘moving in and out of religion’ (2018). Lax’s religious trajectory, as will become clear, is paralleled with a trajectory of gender transformation. The story of Joy Ladin, who was born in a secular Jewish family but then moved to Orthodox Judaism, is primarily that of gender transition but this implies a trajectory of religious transformation as well. To both stories, I will bring the set of questions posed by conversion studies and transgender studies, focusing on how transition is embodied and how both women, in their corporeal trajectories of transformation, affirm or question the definitions of gender, religion and secularity their particular contexts present them with. Leah Lax – Uncovered (2015) For Leah Lax, the publication of Uncovered constituted her breakthrough as an author. Lax won the Writer’s League of Texas Discover Award and was a finalist for the Pirate’s Alley/PEN Faulkner Award, the May Sarton

110  Mariecke van den Berg Award, and the Chautauqua Prize. In the autobiography she narrates her conversion to Hasidism in the 1980s, followed by years of doubt about her life in the Hasidic community, and finally her decision to leave both the community and her marriage. It is both a coming-­of-­age and a coming-­out story. Lax locates her motives for conversion in growing up in an unstable family home with an absent mother who is more interested in her art than in her three daughters and a mentally ill (and, the reader finds out much later in the novel, also abusive) father. Growing up, Lax experiences the family’s Jewish identity as superfluous: it is present in half-­hearted attempts to send the daughters to Reform Jewish Sunday School and in bedtime stories and songs. As a teen, Lax comes into contact with a Hasidic movement that is actively proselytising among fellow Jews. Together with a friend, she visits a ‘Hasidic introductory weekend’ where she is fascinated with the strong presence of ritual, rule, music, and dance in Hasidic life. Upon finishing high school, she attends the women’s summer camp and joins a small Hasidic community on campus (North Texas University, Denton). Here, she becomes even more convinced that Hasidism will be a secure alternative to her unstable childhood and will offer her the clear scripts of gender that will help her handle insecurities about her own gender identity. She marries Levi, also a convert to Hasidim, and they move to Houston, where they will have seven children. The whole process of conversion and the following years of parenting are, however, fraught with doubt. Lax is alternately attracted to and appalled by the strict gender segregation and regulations of sexuality of her new faith and has growing trouble finding spiritual meaning and fulfilment in a life that is so strictly controlled. Over the years, she has a growing awareness of her attraction to women. After living as a Hasidic woman for 30 years, she realises that there is no room in Hasidism for her own conceptions of womanhood, her attraction to women, her understanding of God, and her desire to write. Leah Lax’s autobiography is a narrative of conversion told from the perspective of someone who also ‘moved out’. This may be part of the explanation as to why the tensions and inner struggles that led to her departure from Hasidism, as well as a rather apologetic description of her motives for joining in the first place, are present from the onset. Central to these tensions are competing perspectives on how to obtain a secure self, how to narrate one’s story of life in the first place, and how to inhabit one’s body in a manner that feels comfortable, safe, and authentic. These aspects of securing, telling, and embodying the self are often intimately intertwined. One basic means of self-­security that Hasidism has to offer, and that therefore is attractive to Lax, is its emphasis on Jewish heritage. For Lax, this is an important ticket into a tight community that otherwise, she suspects, would have been closed off to her. An important moment in this respect is when, in the early stage of her conversion process, she overhears a fellow member of the community talking about her with the Yiddish phrase Zie iz an eigener, ‘she is an insider’ (110). Later, in moments of doubt, she will

Embodying transformation 111 remember this event, clinging to the word eigener and all that it entails: not just her own inclusion into the community, but also the opportunity to offer her children the sense of belonging that she had to do without. However, while a basic Jewish identity thus seems to be evident for Lax, the specific Hasidic habitus needs to be learned, and this process of conversion-­ within-­Judaism is described as a very embodied process. I  would like to discuss three themes of embodied transformation that appear prominently in Uncovered: the metaphor of the soldier, the sheitel (wig), and the mikvah (ritual bath). Very prominent in Uncovered is the metaphor of the soldier: a comparison between becoming Hasidic and the imagery of being incorporated in the military occurs no less than 18 times. For Lax, it seems to indicate the unified character of Hasidic life and dress, the commitment to its goals, and the loss of individual identity in exchange for membership in the community. In the comparison of Hasidic and military life, the previous becomes characterised as absolute and internalised, like the drills of soldiering: “A soldier doesn’t wear his uniform. He is his uniform. That’s what a Hasid is, a faceless soldier for God” (142). Lax’s religious transformation thus, at times, reads as a religious bootcamp. In line with the metaphor of the soldier, but also laden with its own connotations, is the prominence of hair in Uncovered. Like a male soldier on his first day of basic training, Lax is expected to shave her head. Upon marrying her husband Levi, she is supposed to start wearing a wig instead. Yet her ambivalent relation to the wig shows that her moving in (and out) of Hasidism is not as radical and all-­encompassing as the metaphor of the soldier suggests. Lax’s relationship to the wig shows that, rather than simply ‘following orders’, she negotiates with the demands of Hasidism. Lax does not cut her hair upon marriage, as is required, but does so only after the birth of her first child. This is the moment she feels she needs to secure a Hasidic home for her family, which would imply her wearing a wig. Yet also after this decision, she is undecided both in her attitude toward and practice of wearing the wig. An important moment in her decision to stop wearing it altogether is when her husband Levi, due to cancer treatment, loses the facial hair (beard and sidelocks) that defines him as a Hasidic male. The moment when the ‘uniform’ starts to become too tight is when Levi, who in the past said that he would rather suffer unemployment than make concessions on his Hasidic appearance by shaving and thus looking more ‘acceptable’ during job interviews, loses these important identity markers. But this is his beard. His uniform. For God. . . . “It’s only hair,” Levi says. “And my wig is only hair,” I tell him. . . . Symbols become just things. The beard is no longer something to sacrifice for. When life is at stake, it’s only hair. (299)

112  Mariecke van den Berg Interestingly, Lax’s negotiations with her hair and her wig are not only related to the Hasidic community but also to the secular world. When she decides to go back to college, she finds that fellow students treat her differently because she dresses as a pious woman. It is only after she loses the wig and headscarf, and starts to dress in a more ‘modern’ fashion, that they start taking her seriously. While Lax describes these events in terms of relief and an encouragement to further explore secular life, underlying these experiences is a secular critique on pious religious women. Apparently, for her fellow students, the possibility that an observant Hasidic woman may have something interesting to say does not cross their minds. Finally, Lax’s process of moving in and out of Hasidism can be observed in her attitude towards and practice of going to the mikvah. This is an aspect of observant Jewish life which, contrary to many other aspects of observance, remains meaningful to her for a long time; it is literally the last thing she ‘gives up’. Going to the mikvah, a ritual required of converts and of married observant Jewish women after menstruation, offers some space for Lax to embody her faith in a more individual manner, it is “a body prayer” (167). Perhaps because of the privacy that is built into the ritual (only one other woman is present as a witness), for Lax, visiting the mikvah becomes a ritual that connects her to previous generations of women and allows her to develop her own spirituality: I die here. I become a single drop in the greater pool of women, of history, of God. Under the water, I am surrounded by floating female figures from my people’s past, praying, drifting, hoping. I am at the vortex of a vast funnel; I see I’m not alone. I do this five more times, seven in all, die and die, until the airless, timeless moments all swirl together. Standing now, sleek wet hair molded to my head, I face the tiled wall in an intimate contract with God, handing him my secret self. Here, I whisper. Take this. (167–168) Perhaps the mikvah appeals to her because it is, as a rabbi explains to her at a conference for Hasidic women, “ ‘a place of transition between before and after, between this world and the next. A place between time’ ” (159). In a world that consists of strict rules and expectations, the mikvah offers space for liminality, for the indefinite. The mikvah also becomes the place where Lax’s struggles over her gender and sexual identity become most visible. She gets a new perspective on the mikvah when she gets involved in an art project about the ritual practice. Together with a female artist, she visits Hasidic women who talk about their experiences. Among them are a newlywed, Dinah, who sees the mikvah as a form of divine destiny (311), but also Chana, who is attracted to women and goes to the mikvah “to wash away her resistance to God’s holy plan of heterosexuality, marriage, and children” (314–315). These meetings confront Lax with her own struggles

Embodying transformation 113 over her gender identity and sexual preferences. In her dreams or daydreaming, she often has been a boy or a man, sometimes participating in religious practices like dance or study, or sometimes engaging in sex with a woman. Hasidism is both a cause and a solution for these confusions: because of its strict gender divide, there is only little space for Lax to explore different gendered practices, but this strict dividing line also offers her a sense of security over her gender identity. Although she is confused over her personal gender identity, (binary) gender itself is beyond dispute. Gradually, however, it becomes clear to her that her confusion is not (only) about gender but (also) about sexual attraction: “I  wonder, why do I  keep dreaming I’m a man? Because I refuse to admit that I might have been a woman making love to a woman in this, my most erotic of dreams” (161–162). She discovers that the practice of going to the mikvah can also be a source for agency in that is allows her to regulate her own sex life: as long as she does not go, Levi cannot have intercourse with her. The liminal experience of the mikvah thus enables an equally liminal erotic life: no longer spent with Levi, but neither with the women she is secretly attracted to. Hearing Chana’s experience with the mikvah, however, functions as a mirror for her own life, in a sense ‘contaminating’ even this ritual, which until then had been a positive spiritual experience, but which she now sees as also a potentially disciplining practice. The metaphor of the soldier, the changing considerations over hair and wig, and the changing attitude towards the mikvah show how Lax’s process of moving in and out of Hasidism does not exist of one single move ‘in’ and one single move ‘out’, but rather, a culmination of practices and negotiations. While material objects such as the wig and practices such as the ritual bath can be read as part of the ‘uniform’, of a set of disciplinary practices, they are also the sites where Lax can negotiate a space for herself. It seems, however, that this room for negotiation in the end is too limited, and when even the mikvah loses its function as a liminal space of transition, possibility, and spirituality, there is not enough for her to go on in leading a Hasidic life. She then has to ‘unlearn’ Hasidism, and just like unlearning military life is an embodied process (Grimell and Van den Berg 2019), so is leaving the ‘ranks’ of the Hasidic community. Joy Ladin – Through the Door of Life (2012) Joy Ladin, born in 1961, is a professor of English at Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University in New York and the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. In her autobiography, Through the Door of Life: A  Jewish Journey Between Genders, Ladin describes her struggles with gender incongruence, coming out as trans, and transitioning, in the time frame of 2007–2010. The impact on her life is severe: her marriage ends in a divorce, she is struggling with her relationship with her three children, and Yeshiva University initially sends her on involuntary leave. Through the Door of Life is also an account of how

114  Mariecke van den Berg Ladin tries to relocate herself within Jewish tradition and how she finds within that tradition spiritual guidelines that can support her during the process of transitioning, as well as some starting points for articulating a Jewish trans identity. A striking parallel between the autobiographies of Ladin and Lax is that in the confusion of the various transitions that are described, Jewish identity forms a solid reference point. “Thank God I was sure I was Jewish,” sighs Ladin, when attending her first conference on queer issues (235). Like Lax, her Jewish identity is not located in a religious upbringing (Ladin describes her father as an atheist and her mother as adhering to Jewish ritual but without much “heart” in it), but rather in ancestry. This firm Jewish identity is contrasted with a much more fragile gendered self. In Through the Door of Life, transitioning is described as a moving in and out of femininity, a process that is much slower and definitely more painful than Ladin would have liked: I expected instantly to become myself. But transition didn’t magically transport me from life as an imitation man to life as a real woman. I had to create that now  – the now of becoming myself  – not through one magic “Yes!” but through innumerable, sometimes agonizing decisions, choices, commitments. (17) Femininity has to be learned, negotiated, purchased, and explained in a process of trial-­and-­error. Ladin’s account (and to some extent also Lax’s) shows that ‘liminal space’ in itself is not inherently beneficial. Ladin spends much of her time in ‘limbo’ between a male and a female appearance, and while this may have a disruptive function for those around her, it makes her vulnerable, insecure, and anxious. It is not a place where she can breathe, like Lax when she visits the mikvah, but a place that is suffocating. Like Leah Lax, Joy Ladin reflects on how gender conventions can have a paradoxical function. On the one hand, they limit her possibilities in creating a female identity. On the other hand, they do make this female identity possible and thus have their own value: “[T]ransition has taught me that conventions of femininity that many women find tedious, draining, and oppressive can be empowering, self-­affirming, even liberating, as well”(129). Dealing with this paradox and finding her own ways in its possibilities and limitations means she has to relate to Orthodox Judaism, where “gender identity is so central to tradition-­based communities  .  .  . that it is more or less impossible for those communities to accommodate people who can’t be easily identified as male or female” (13). Yet the secular world does not constitute a safe environment where such negotiations are necessarily easier. Upon reading feminist author Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire, a work experienced by many as particularly transphobic, Ladin wonders whether there will be a place for her in the secular feminist circles (128).

Embodying transformation 115 A striking difference between the two autobiographies is that while the story of Leah Lax culminates in the impossible co-­existence of erotic desires for women and Hasidic identity and therefore a move to the ‘secular world’, Ladin does not experience a definitive split between her transgender identity and her religion. Rather, she tries to create a space (theologically, ritually, and socially) for Jewish transgender bodies within her religious social context. Her story of gender transition is therefore very much also a story of the innovations that may transform religion. In what follows I discuss some of the ways in which she explores how her own transgender body relates to scriptural bodies, how it can be implied in daily Jewish practices, and how it can move through Jewish social space. First, Ladin feels she needs to deal with what she calls ‘God’s Deuteronomic disgust’ (173) toward transgender bodies in the prohibition in Deuteronomy 22:5: “A woman must not put on a man’s appeal, nor shall a man wear women’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to the Lord your God”. Ladin describes her ambivalent feelings towards this particular law when growing up as a closeted trans youth. On the one hand, this is the only verse in the Tanakh that at least acknowledges that ‘people like her’ even exist. On the other, the dismissal within the text is overpowering (172). Initially, Ladin tries to find loopholes in the law. Perhaps the fact that she, as neither man nor woman but as a transsexual, is exempt from the prohibition (ibid.). Or the fact that cross-­dressing for her is a necessity, something that cannot be helped, will force God to make an exception, like exceptions are made for Jews who are starving and are therefore allowed to eat non-­kosher food (173). The loopholes prove to be unsatisfactory. Yet, both as a child and as an adult, Ladin in fact often experiences God as very close. During childhood, God, as her creator, is the only one who can see her as she truly is, while her family cannot. Prayers to be changed into a girl, however, remain unanswered, and Ladin learns how to communicate with a ‘silent God’. One way is to recognise moments when tradition opens up to those with a fluid gender identity. Ladin’s reading of the ritual of circumcision is such a moment: The rabbis interpret circumcision as an operation that “perfects” the male sexual organ. God, they say, left a little extra skin on the penis so that Jewish men could remove it and turn their genitalia into a physical sign of their true identity. From a trans perspective, this is a radial teaching. If an operation to alter genitalia is necessary to bring the male Jewish body into conformity with the Jewish soul, then God long ago acknowledged that medical intervention may be necessary for human beings to achieve their true identities. . . . Even when God is silent, that tradition speaks to me. (180–181) On the level of practice, Ladin is much less explicit than is Leah Lax, whose life within the Hasidic community was to a large extent characterised by

116  Mariecke van den Berg daily observance of the law. Ladin does not often refer to the demands of Orthodox Jewish femininity that so challenged Lax, and if she does, she discusses it as something that her female students may aspire to, but not as an integral part of her own religious life. Her involvement in Judaism seems to be more intellectual and text-­oriented and less about ritual practice. Yet there are moments where she needs or wishes to negotiate with gendered Jewish practices. When her father dies, she is suddenly forced to consider her relation to gendered mourning rituals. Also the morning prayer, where men thank God for not creating them ‘a woman’, while women thank God for creating them ‘according to God’s will’, becomes important for her to relate in new ways to her tradition. Jewish feminists justly despise this separate-­and-­unequal system, but women get the better blessing. The male version is defensive, as though male privilege might collapse if men forget to look down on women for a day. The female version is an affirmation that who and what we are reflects God’s will –that we are what we should be, what we need to be, that our existence is a blessing. (213) Finally, Ladin also needs to create a social space for herself within Orthodox Judaism. At Yeshiva University, this involves negotiations with the dean and with the students about how much she can reveal about her gender identity. Furthermore, two experiences at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, in 2002 and 2008, the first before her transition and the second one after, illustrate how her body ‘moves through Judaism’ differently now. In 2002 the Wall, with its mechitzah, the screen dividing women and men, scares her: “to approach the wall, you have to know which side you are on” (205). There is a contrast with the post-­transition experience in 2008: Though no one here knows it, my presence is also transforming the mechitza that separates the Wailing Wall into male and female portions. They wouldn’t allow me on the men’s side, not in my skirt and blouse and earrings and makeup, but, if the women knew what was behind my female presentation, they wouldn’t allow me among them, either. . . . If I move among them, I will be violating their sacred space. If I back away, I will be cutting myself off from my people. And then I realize I’ve already made my decision: when I committed myself to transition, I  decided that I  would no longer cut off pieces of myself to maintain walls between male and female. I belong to this place, this people, and they belong to me. (210–211) In Ladin’s autobiography theology, body and the gendered self are interconnected and constantly understood and reinterpreted in relation to each

Embodying transformation 117 other. Refusing to give up on either her Jewish or her transgender identity, Ladin invests in a theology that accommodates her transgender body and self. In doing so, it is not only she but also her religious tradition that transitions, or at least one can say that Ladin offers the theological signposts for such a transition.

Conclusion In this chapter I have explored two types of human transformation which are popular topics for debate in contemporary Western societies, namely religious and gender transitions. While at first sight these transformations may seem very different, they actually have a lot in common: gender transitions often have a spiritual component, while religious conversion is often made possible by a form of gender transition. I have argued that in order to understand not only how human transformation ‘works’, but also to develop a sensitivity regarding the ‘politics of transformation’, prominent questions from the fields of transgender studies and conversion studies should be brought into dialogue. As fields specified in the study of personal change, these fields offer the tools to analyse the narrative imperatives of telling stories of transformation, the fragility of transformed selves, the unilinear process that so often characterises conversion and transgender transition, and, importantly, the ways in which transformations are embodied. By analysing two narratives of religious and gender transformation in the autobiographies of Leah Lax and Joy Ladin, I  have illustrated how these narratives can be unconventional and disruptive when one focuses on embodied negotiations with gendered, religious, and secular scripts. In Leah Lax’s Uncovered, it becomes clear that the borders between the Hasidic community and secular life are more porous than probably both Hasidism and secular society would acknowledge. Her story shows that Hasidism’s gender norms are disciplinary but also provide security. Moreover, Lax’s changing attitude toward and practice of wearing the wig and going to the mikvah show that her religious transformation did not consist of a simple ‘in’ or ‘out’, but of an ongoing reconsideration of Hasidic femininity and sexuality. Joy Ladin’s Through the Door of Life is an example of how autobiographies of religious and gender transition can question the dominant classical plot of misery-­turning-­to-­happiness. In her work, the beginning is not all bad, the end not all well. Overall, Ladin seems reluctant to think in strong oppositions, inhabiting the awkward, liminal position of the dividing line itself rather than being forced to choose sides. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why her religious and gender transformation does not depend on a narrated journey from a religious past to a secular present and future, nor from religious convictions to secular emancipatory freedom. Ladin seems to be judging religious and secular scripts on their own merits, refusing to see them as exclusionary. In her autobiography she acknowledges that feminism can

118  Mariecke van den Berg be a hostile place for transgender women, while the Torah can be hospitable. Some people can deny her gender identity, while God can be affirming. In determinedly investing in a theological and social space for transgender bodies within the context of Orthodox Judaism, she shows how her personal transformation also holds the potential to transform her tradition as a whole. One final remark to conclude this chapter concerns the way in which in contemporary popular culture stories of transformation are told. There seems to be an imperative for authors to let their stories be accounts of the pursuit of happiness. Yet there is much reason to become suspicious when happiness is served as the end result of a process of transformation, especially if the kind of happiness that is aspired to is based on a sense of belonging that can only exist by virtue of conformity. The autobiographies by Leah Lax and Joy Ladin show how processes of transformation are often more complicated than any clear-­cut plot of transition suggests. Joy Ladin in particular shows how not telling a story of the pursuit of happiness can be a political choice in refusing to confirm strict binaries between male and female, observant and liberal, religious and secular. She asks of the reader an important question regarding the art of transitioning: is it possible to understand and support the transition of a fellow human being who cannot promise the gift of a happy ending? Might such a story form a critical perspective on the kinds of transformations that in our present-­day culture are rendered intelligible and legitimate?

Note 1 In this chapter, I will alternately use ‘transgender transition’, ‘gender transitioners’, or variations to these terms, to refer to individuals who choose to change their gender expression. Used as such, the term ‘transgender transition’ does not do justice to the term ‘transgender’ which does not necessarily refer to individuals who undergo gender confirming treatment or processes, but is an umbrella term for all practices and identities that disrupt fixed notions of gender identity and expression (Stryker 2006, 3). I would like to emphasize that even though I here use a narrow definition of ‘transgender’ in the sense of gender transformation, I acknowledge that the term implies an immense variation in dealing with gendered expression and experience.

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6 “The Richest Material for Moral Reflection” Narrated bodies and narrative ethics Megan Milota Introduction A fundamental assumption of this chapter, and one that must be addressed before proceeding any further, is that reading informs one’s view of the world and can play a role in one’s self-­conception and moral stance. This may seem like an obvious observation, but the purpose, result, even measurability of this interaction – often referred to as narrative ethics – has been a topic contentiously debated as far back as the ancient Greeks. According to Liesbeth Korthals Altes, a Dutch scholar who has extensively explored the intersections of ethics and literature, “with respects to ethics in/and narratology or narrative theory, it seems particularly appropriate to clarify what kinds of knowledge and relevance we strive for, as in such approaches, normative attitudes may be expected to pay a prominent role” (Korthals Altes 2013, 30). With this in mind, I  would like to begin by saying something about the site of the reading I intend to describe as well as the “kinds of knowledge” a particular narrative encounter can generate and the normative attitudes it can reveal. I am a member of the Medical Humanities department at a university hospital in the Netherlands. Along with my colleagues, experts in the fields of medical history, bioethics, law, and philosophy, I teach our undergraduate and graduate medical and paramedical students about the cultural, social, and historical contexts of their profession. As a literature scholar, I have also been given the task of teaching our students the value of narratives. Having been thoroughly indoctrinated in the world of evidence-­based medicine, we feel they can benefit from the reminder that individual patients’ stories and experiences are an essential part of any diagnostic trajectory. In Western medicine at least, the eliciting and analysis of patient narratives (commonly called the history of present illness or anamneses) constitutes the first step in most diagnoses (Vannatta and Vannatta 2013, 34). In fact, it has been estimated that a physician will encounter roughly 200,000 illness narratives during his or her career (Lipkin, Putnam, and Lazar 1995, ix, cited in Vannatta and Vannatta 2013, 34). Like the bioethicist and physician Howard Brody, I believe that our medical practitioners should learn to appreciate and interpret a patient’s story as

“The Richest Material for Moral Reflection” 123 a necessary first step in creating a more equitable clinical relationship. For the patient who feels listened to by a physician, according to Brody, is also more likely to show a positive response to treatment (Brody 1994, 82). As Brody also states, “the construction of narrative is not something added by an outside observer; it is a critical portion of the healing encounter” (Brody 1994, 84). Studies have also indicated that chronically ill patients who feel more empowered and listened to during their encounters with their healthcare providers report more therapy compliance and better general health (Bodenheimer 2006; Lenzen et al. 2018). In this chapter, I would like to first explain how the act of reading exemplary illness narratives can help doctors think in new or transformative ways about their patients. In the second part of this chapter, I will examine a literary case study, Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air (2016). Kalanithi’s memoir describes a series of profound transformations in his life: from a literature scholar to a neurologist, from a healthy young doctor at the beginning of a promising career to a dying patient, and from an atheist to a tentative believer. As I hope to illustrate, Kalanithi’s illness narrative provides ample opportunities for self-­reflection and growth, as it explicitly grapples with a series of ethical questions, the most important being where do “biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect?” (Kalanithi 2016, 41). In the third and final part of this chapter, I will briefly describe a practical exercise I  developed for the medical students I  teach using Kalanithi’s memoir that is meant to stimulate ethical reflection.

Part one: bodies of theory Arthur Frank – doctor, cancer survivor, and writer – makes the argument that one way to make students more competent doctors is by providing them with opportunities to gain practical moral wisdom, or phronesis. According to Frank, “a person develops phronesis by taking his or her values through the trials of multiple actions and by reflecting on the outcomes” (Frank 2004, 221). One powerful way of expanding one’s phronetic capacities, Frank argues, is by encountering the stories of others. Frank furthermore distinguishes between the act of thinking about stories and thinking with stories. His preference is for the latter as it involves a “hermeneutic mutual engagement” rather than an objectifying analysis (Frank 2004, 209). At Columbia University’s prestigious Narrative Medicine Program, co-­ founder Rita Charon – an internist with a PhD in Literature – and her team have developed and valorised their own approach to thinking about and with stories. Columbia’s strategy for teaching students to expand their phronetic capacities is by stimulating more ‘narrative competence’. According to Charon, this competence, or ability to understand and be moved to action by the narrative situations of others (Charon 2001, 83), is a skill that can be taught with the help of methods and theories from the field of literary studies. Without this “fluency as a reader and receiver of accounts

124  Megan Milota of others”, Charon warns, “the doctor is hapless, unable to fathom what in fact is occurring in the life of the patient, the life beyond the confines of the organs” (Charon 2011, 38). Narrative medicine classroom interventions like those envisioned by Frank and practised at Columbia University are increasingly common in medical schools across the United States and are gradually being integrated into medical school programs in other parts of the world (Milota, van Thiel, and Delden 2019). Like my own assertion at the beginning of this chapter, these pedagogic approaches are based on the fundamental assumption that reading is an ethical act. For in order to read a narrative, one must consider the actions, thoughts, and ethical positions of another. This doesn’t necessarily have to lead to a fundamental change in the reader’s morals or beliefs, but reading does, according to Shannon Wooden, constitute an ethical gesture in the sense that it involves “reading with” and briefly “dwelling in” the perspective of the other (Wooden 2011, 277). The narrative competence taught in narrative-­based courses is meant to complement, not replace evidence-­based medicine and modern scientific progress. Such an approach is furthermore meant to help practitioners “understand that technology is powerless in the absence of a relationship between two human beings whose clinical encounter is both moral and instrumental” (Holmgren et al. 2011, 255). Theoretical publications about narrative medicine typically describe a pedagogic strategy consisting of three basic steps: a critical engagement with an art form (reading, listening, viewing), reflective writing, and discussion (see, for example, Charon et al. 2016; Balmer 2012). But as the founders of the Columbia Narrative Medicine program admit, “the teaching methods of narrative medicine range widely” and “there are probably as many methods of teaching close reading as there are methods of teaching human anatomy” (Charon et al. 2016, 4; 181). This being said, they insist that “wherever and with whomever the teaching occurs, it is marked by attention to . . . intersubjectivity, relationality, personhood and embodiment, action toward justice, close reading (or slow looking), and creativity” (Charon et al. 2016, 4). My own strategies for integrating narrative ethics into medical school curricula are premised on a distinction between an ethics of reading and an ethics while reading as outlined by narrative ethicist Daniel Schwarz (2001, 13). While Schwarz describes ways of approaching literary fiction, I’ve found his distinction equally applicable to illness narratives as well. Accordingly, an ethics of reading “proposes that we interpret a given literary work by reading that text from multiple perspectives” and with both the original and contemporary audiences in mind (2001, 12). Theories that can be grouped in this category operate “from outside the text” (Korthals Altes 2013, 30) in that they analyse the impact of a narrative from a critical distance and take reception into account. Schwarz’s second category, ethics while reading, differs from an ethics of reading “in its attention to a value-­oriented epistemology. An ethics while reading implies attention

“The Richest Material for Moral Reflection” 125 to moral issues generated by events described within an imagined world. It asks what ethical questions are involved in the act of transforming life into art” (Schwarz 2001, 12). In other words, theories that fall under this category begin ‘inside’ a text and limit their responses to “the intersubjective relations within texts” (Schwarz 2001, 5), for example, by meditating on the implications of the characters and events in a story world on readers’ moral stance. I believe that by shifting between more distanced critical analysis and a self-­implicated interpretation of narrative texts during the course of a group discussion, readers will be more likely to critically query their own moral positions, experiences, and sources of bias as well as those depicted in a narrative. Or as Terence Holt has noted, “a reader reading well is simultaneously experiencing the text, responding to it emotionally, and at the same time analysing that response” (Holt 2004, 330). My pedagogic approach is also inspired by Louise Rosenblatt’s conceptualisation of “transactional reading,” a term used to encompass her view that each person brings to the reading of a text the transaction, “not only a specific life and literary history, not only a repertory of internalised ‘codes,’ but also a very active present, with all its preoccupations, anxieties, questions, and aspirations” (Rosenblatt 1978, 144). Janet Wolff’s The Social Production of Art (1984) provides further nuance to this understanding of reading and interpretation when she writes that a reader’s interpretation is guided partially by the structure of the text, but that the way in which the reader engages with the text and constructs meaning is a function of his or her place in ideology and in society. In other words, the role of the reader is creative but is at the same time situated. (Wolff 1984, 115) It is from these interrelated theoretical positions that I would like to now turn my attention to Paul Kalinithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air. In the remainder of this chapter I intend to look at both how the narrative is constructed and the reported impact it has had on readers. As I mentioned at the outset, my goal is to illustrate how a reading of this text can potentially transform the practical wisdom and developing ethos of one group of readers: future medical practitioners.

Part two: narrating the sick body After its publication in 2016, Paul Kalanithi’s memoir When Breath Becomes Air spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list for non-­ fiction, a testament to its widespread appeal. Readers learn on the first page of Kalanithi’s prologue that his death is imminent: I flipped through the CT scan images, the diagnosis obvious: the lungs matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of

126  Megan Milota the liver obliterated. Cancer, widely disseminated. I was a neurosurgical resident entering my final year of training. Over the last six years, I’d examined scores of such scans, on the off chance that some procedure might benefit the patient. But this scan was different: it was my own. (Kalanithi 2016, 3) This admission of Kalanithi’s position as both a terminally ill patient and a medical practitioner places it squarely in the subgenre of pathographies, or patient illness narratives, written by doctors.1 This is not the only duality that Kalanithi explores in his brief memoir, one that he unfortunately did not live to finish and was therefore pieced together and published posthumously by his wife. Kalanithi is also a literary scholar, one who wrote a master’s thesis on Walt Whitman’s “Physiological-­Spiritual” man at Stanford and whose love for fictional forms was driven by a desire to “understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful?” (Kalanithi 2016, 30). This sustained love for literature, one that he describes in depth in the first of the two chapters of his memoir, leads him to conclude that “literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life” (Kalanithi 2016, 31). This desire to better understand real human life, to directly experience ‘life-­and-­death questions’ and engage in moral action rather than mere moral speculation, according to Kalanithi, prompts his decision to go to medical school rather than pursue a PhD in literature. During his residency, Kalanithi has a series of revelations that profoundly alter his moral views. First, he grasps that “the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context” (Kalanithi 2016, 70). Second, he realises that his task as a doctor is to empathise with his patients at these moments and to guide them as best he can, for “when there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool” (Kalanithi 2016, 87). Third, he discovers that this role is pastoral in nature (Kalanithi 2016, 88) and carries with it “an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility” (Kalanithi 2016, 114). His training as a neurosurgeon, where being a millimetre off during surgery can irrevocably change a patient’s selfhood, makes him appreciate what he calls the “sacred” burden of protecting another human being’s life, identity, and soul (Kalanithi 2016, 89). His medical training also helps him understand that death, one way or another, will always win (Kalanithi 2016, 89). Unwilling to paint himself as a wholly virtuous and enlightened doctor, Kalanithi also makes it clear that these insights were preceded by moments of frustration, callousness, arrogance, and apathy. In one passage of the memoir, for example, he describes his conflicting thoughts about the cadaver, or donor, he must work with during his anatomy lab. In the beginning, he is acutely aware of the fact that the donor’s body he

“The Richest Material for Moral Reflection” 127 must dissect was once an individual person with a family and a lifetime of experiences. But as his dissection sessions span weeks and then months, he forgets his initial acknowledgement of and respect for the human body he has been given to examine, and sees his donor instead as a mere thing or object of study: On that first day, you simply could not deny the humanity of the corpse. But by the time you’d skinned the limbs, sliced through inconvenient muscles, pulled out the lungs, cut open the heart, and removed a lobe of the liver, it was hard to recognise this pile of tissue as human. (Kalanithi 2016, 49) Similarly, Kalanithi recalls various episodes as a harried resident when he treated his patients brusquely or thought of them as a nuisance or task to be completed rather than as suffering human beings deserving of his time and, more importantly, his empathy. In perhaps the starkest narrative example of Kalanithi’s sporadic apathy, he describes sneaking into an emergency room to retrieve his lunch amidst mourning family members. He writes, with one of the ER residents covering for me, I slipped back in [to the trauma bay], ghostlike, to save the ice cream sandwich in front of the corpse of the son I could not. Thirty minutes in the freezer resuscitated the sandwich. Pretty tasty, I thought, picking chocolate chips out of my teeth as the family said its last goodbyes. (Kalanithi 2016, 83–84) Here Kalanithi’s own bodily urges and needs (in this case, hunger at the end of a gruelling shift) trump the rights and needs of his patient and his patient’s family to be treated with respect in death and to be left to mourn in peace and privacy. While passages like these may be considered shocking to some readers, they are nevertheless honest in their portrayal of the less noble facets of the medical profession. The moral failings and strides Kalanithi makes in his personal and professional life are challenged in the second chapter of his memoir, which details the deterioration of his physical body after diagnosis with stage IV lung cancer. He finds that “instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. Severe illness wasn’t life-­altering, it was life shattering” (Kalanithi 2016, 120). Subjected to hours of physical therapy to recover some of his strength after his first round of cancer treatment, Kalanithi experiences first-­hand the physical and emotional challenges of the revalidation regimes he had prescribed for countless patients, prompting him to consider for the first time “how little do doctors understand the hells through which we put our patients” (Kalanithi 2016, 102).

128  Megan Milota Kalanithi describes himself as an atheist “for a good chunk” (Kalanithi 2016, 169) of his adult life as a result of his indoctrination into a material, scientific worldview. As he explains: During my sojourn into ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal levelled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos.  .  .  . There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God. (Kalanithi 2016, 168) In spite of this worldview, Kalanithi nevertheless uses notably Christian rhetoric to describe the “sacred” and “pastoral” nature of his work as well as the potential existence of a soul or individuality that can be irrevocably altered by a surgeon’s misplaced scalpel. It is only after his body begins to fail, though, that he writes about his transformation in belief to the aforementioned conception of the divine, one indelibly marked by his Christian upbringing. Having given up his position as a neurosurgeon to devote his remaining time to caring for his newborn daughter and writing, Kalanithi reassesses his stance toward God; he comes to realise the fundamental problem with his moral position, namely that “to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning – to consider a world that is self-­evidently not the world we live in” (Kalanithi 2016, 169). Knowing that his death is fast approaching, Kalanithi consoles himself – and arguably his readers – with the belief that “human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them” (Kalanithi 2016, 172). During his narrative, Kalanithi undergoes a series of significant transformations. He evolves from a literature scholar who contemplates moral questions and dilemmas to one who actively engages with them in a clinical setting. He changes from a naïve and sometimes callous medical student to a more empathic and serious chief resident who understands the burdens and responsibilities of his profession. Finally, a decade after starting his medical training and mere months before he can officially finish his neurosurgery specialisation (arguably the most academically and technically rigorous in the medical profession), he is forced switch roles from doctor to dying patient. While undergoing these transformations, Kalanithi seems to address four distinct implied audiences; these readership categories are mirrored in the popular and academic reviews of the memoir. The first group consists of Kalanithi’s peers, who would readily understand the medical jargon he uses throughout his memoir and who would presumably sympathise and commiserate with his descriptions of his 70–80 hour work weeks prior to his diagnosis. The overwhelmingly positive appraisal of the memoir in scientific journals testifies to the fact that this group of readers appreciated Kalanithi’s

“The Richest Material for Moral Reflection” 129 embeddedness in the medical profession. For example, The Lancet’s review of When Breath Becomes Air praised Kalanithi’s elegant approach to his own mortality, adding that the memoir could serve as a model for other medical professionals as it illustrates “how much the practice of reflection can enrich one’s work and one’s life” (Jurecic and Marchalik 2016, 2859). A review in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine even expands the boundaries of the implied professional audience, claiming that “bioethicists, especially non-­ clinicians, should find this book thought-­provoking and rewarding. Here a physician reflecting on his practice and his experience as a patient illustrates medical ethics from the inside” (Miller 2016, 585). Second, Kalanithi’s intertextual literary references would arguably appeal to an audience of literature scholars and literature lovers; similarly, his skills as a writer would appeal to readers who value the aesthetic properties of a narrative. Feminist literary scholar Susan Gubar’s New York Times review confirms this hypothesis; she writes that “Dr. Kalanithi proves that we need more physicians who assimilate the arts and the humanities as well as more artists and humanists who assimilate the science of medicine” (Gubar 2017). In fact, reviews in both academic journals and popular media praised Kalanithi’s writing style and eloquence.2 As another glowing review in The Journal of Palliative Medicine concludes: “Kalanithi possessed rare expertise, literary sophistication, and heightened self-­awareness into this small, but weighty book” (Rossmassler and Gray 2016, 1123). Third, Kalanithi’s descriptions of his experiences as a patient could appeal to others who have personally endured similar ordeals or have borne witness to a family member or friend’s illness narrative. As a review in the AMA Journal of Ethics points out, his memoir can both comfort and guide others coping with a terminal diagnosis because “Kalanithi’s writing creates a space for patients who do not believe that fighting until the end (with the hope of a miraculous cure) and hoping for a peaceful death are mutually exclusive” (Caruso Brown and Garden 2017, 503). According to another reviewer, the value of the memoir lies in the fact that it reminds readers “that as long as we are still breathing, we have a chance – an opportunity – to figure out what matters to use and makes for a meaningful existence” (Martin 2017, 121). The final intended audience, the only one Kalanithi explicitly addresses, consists of one reader: his daughter Cady. After musing on the futility of writing her letters – what would he say? what will she even be like when she is old enough to read them? – his memoir instead ends with a simple message written to Cady: he assures her that her mere existence filled his final days with “a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied” (Kalanithi 2016, 199). As a means of putting the theoretical contributions about narrative ethics mentioned in the first part of this chapter to practice, this short summary of When Breath Becomes Air and its reception has tried to think about the memoir’s plot elements and predominant themes as well as some of the

130  Megan Milota aforementioned groups of readers’ interests, preferences, and backgrounds. Combining this appraisal of the field of reception with a consideration of thematic materials in the memoir and the intended audiences they were arguably written for further offers a more comprehensive account of why this text matters to so many readers. The various positions from which Kalanithi tells his own illness narrative  – doctor, scholar, patient, father, believer – also create opportunities for a variety of readers to think with his story. The critical reception published in medical journals makes clear that this text has the potential to foster personal reflection as the memoir “offers insight and rich food for thought about issues that matter to everyone” (Miller 2016, 582). For the remainder of this chapter, I would like to supplement this reception with my own anecdotal experiences of using this text in a medical school classroom setting.

Part three: training moral bodies In 2017, I was asked to create an assignment for fifth-­year medical students returning from their first sustained residency period. I developed a series of book and film pairings that the students would discuss in unsupervised small groups with the aid of a list of discussion questions intended to help them approach and analyse the narrative from both the “outside in” and “inside out”, or from critically distanced and self-­implicated analytical positions.3 After the discussion, each student was expected to write up a summary of the meeting as well as a personal reflection on how the chosen texts and the group discussion had affected them. At the beginning of the 2018 academic year, this assignment was shifted to the fourth-­year curriculum. Now the students read the books and watched the films during a shorter six-­week internship and discussed the assignment during a mandatory terugkomdag (return day) halfway through their internships. Unlike the format of the assignment in the first year, the discussion is now led by a teacher from the department of Medical Humanities. All of the teachers –12 in total – met with me at the beginning of the academic year to discuss the goals, theoretical underpinnings, and format of this lesson. In the 2017–2018 academic year, students had to write and submit a personal reflection after the discussion; the students now write and share their responses to the following prompt at the end of the discussion session: what did this book/film teach you about the doctor-­patient relationship? What lesson have you learned that you can apply in your professional career? Whether observing the sessions during the previous academic year or leading the discussions during the current academic year, what struck me was the students’ varied appraisals of When Breath Becomes Air, which were both critically distanced and personal in nature. Some students’ critiques of the memoir were related to the narrative’s structure and style. Other students noted the lack of adventurous plot and overabundance of essayistic reflections as hindrances to their reading experiences. This being

“The Richest Material for Moral Reflection” 131 said, participants in other groups praised the exact same elements or praised other structural or stylistic elements of the text. One group, for example, discussed at length the portrayal of time in the illness narrative, and more than one student admitted to having made a primitive timeline in order to better understand the trajectory of Kalanithi’s illness. In the group discussions I observed, the topic of Kalanithi’s unique narrative position as both a medical expert and a patient always came up. Most students considered this a strength of the memoir as it made them consider the thoughts and fears of their patients from a different perspective. In one discussion I observed, a student called the book an “eye-­opener” because he had never before thought about how fundamentally an illness could impact a patient’s identity and view of the world. Interestingly, some students were more wary of Kalanithi’s narrative voice and positioning strategies as doctor and patient. During one conversation, the six participants in the group discussion were unanimous in the value of the book for a general, non-­medical audience interested in learning more about the medical profession, but they nuanced their praise by critiquing Kalanithi’s portrayal of himself as a hard-­ working neurosurgeon. To them, it was clear that he was only focusing on his professional development at the expense of his social life and marriage, and they were worried that Kalanithi’s normalising, sometimes even valorising, depiction of a 70–80 hour work week was sending a skewed and potentially damaging message to other medical professionals that such sacrifice was good or exemplary. They were also critical of Kalanithi’s decision to go back to work after his diagnosis and discussed what they would do if they were to become ill. More broadly, the topic of the medical profession came up in many of the group discussions I observed or led. In one group, for example, the students had an engaging discussion about the ways in which their medical training had essentially taught them to objectify their patients; both the passage about the anatomy lab and the narrative about the ice cream sandwich were mentioned in multiple groups as recognisable and relatable experiences. When Breath Becomes Air served as a reminder for these students that the doctor was merely a part of the process, not the sole determinant. During another discussion, one student remarked – with what I interpreted as an underlying tone of remorse – that the longer she interacted with patients, the less their personal suffering seemed to touch her. In only one group that I  have monitored thus far has the topic of Kalanithi’s personal belief been discussed in depth. During the discussion in question, a student mentioned the passage in the memoir where Kalanithi discussed his stance toward God as part of his longer appraisal of what he called the “philosophical themes” in the book. These were what this student liked most, adding that he agreed with Kalanithi’s conception of the divine. Two other students nodded in apparent assent, and after a brief silence, the discussion turned to how the book made this particular group of readers more attuned to the fact that their patients would have different

132  Megan Milota needs, values, and beliefs, and that they would need to be sensitive to these differences. These discussion sessions last a mere 45 minutes, but this still leaves plenty of time to engage in a rich and varied discussion, as I hope the aforementioned anecdotes have illustrated. By engaging in an ethics of and while reading, or thinking both about and with Kalanithi’s memoir, our medical students analyse the content of the narrative and at the same time relate this content to their own experiences, morals, and beliefs. In addition, this exercise enriches their narrative competence or knowledge of the varying points of view and experiences of others.

Conclusion Ideally, this critical (self) reflective exercise our medical students engage in will also somehow transform their future clinical interactions with their patients by sparking an awareness of the precariousness individuality of each human body. At this point, it still remains to be seen to what extent a close reading of Kalanithi’s memoir will make our future medical professionals more compassionate listeners to and co-­creators of their patients’ stories. My hope, though, is the this phronetic exercises will spark a small transformation in their ethical stance, or at least give them an opportunity to briefly stop and think about why they chose this profession and what kind of doctors they hope to become. I don’t expect them all to become narrative experts, but I nevertheless think that these physicians’ stance toward their patients’ illness narratives is worth emulating. How different, how empowering our interactions with our doctors would be if they all would think and feel like Rita Charon that: Receiving our patients’ stories mobilises material deep within ourselves, transforms us, situates us at the threshold of illness with patients, humbly recognising the patient and appreciating the magnitude of what must be done by that person, now at least not alone. (Charon 2012, 346)

Notes 1 Other physician pathographies include Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller (1995), Jane Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight: A  Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey (2006), and Oliver Sack’s A Leg to Stand On (1984). 2 See, for example, Alice O’Keefe’s review in The Guardian (3 February 2016) or Janet Maslin’s review in The New York Times (7 January 2016). 3 The pairings were thematic in nature and related to the areas of medicine that the students were learning about during the internship block in which the assignment took place. During the 2017–2018 academic year, When Breath Becomes Air was paired with the film The Doctor (1992) and categorised as “Doctor as Patient.” In the 2018–2019 academic year, we changed the film to Médecin de Campagne (2016). The second theme, “Mysterious Brain”, remained the same for

“The Richest Material for Moral Reflection” 133 both years. For this theme we paired The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (2003) and the documentary Life, Animated (2016). The final 2017–2018 pairing, the Dutch memoir Shadow Child [Schaduwkind] (2003) and the Belgian film Broken Circle Breakdown (2012), were categorised as “The Ill Child”. We changed this pairing in 2018 to a theme related to geriatrics, “Until Death do us Part”. We paired Alice Munroe’s novella The Bear Came Over the Mountain (1999) with the film Amour (2012). This is a required assignment for all medical students; at the time of writing, more than 200 Dutch students have read and discussed When Breath Becomes Air.

References Balmer, Dorene F., and Boyd F. Richards. 2012. “Faculty Development as Transformation: Lessons Learned from a Process-­Oriented Program.”  Teaching and Learning in Medicine 24 (3): 242–247. Bodenheimer, Thomas. 2006. “Primary Care: Will It Survive?” New England Journal of Medicine 355 (9): 861–864. Bolte Taylor, Jane. 2006. My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey. New York: Penguin. Brody, Howard. 1994. “ ‘My Story Is Broken, Can You Help Me Fix It?’ Medical Ethics and the Joint Construction of Narrative.” Literature and Medicine 13 (1): 79–92. Caruso Brown, Amy, and Rebecca Garden. 2017. “From Silence into Language: Questioning the Power of Physician Illness Narratives.” AMA Journal of Ethics 19 (5): 501–507. Charon, Rita. 2001. “Narrative Medicine: Form, Function and Ethics.” Annals of Internal Medicine 134: 83–87. Charon, Rita. 2011. “The Novelization of the Body, or How Medicine and Stories Need One Another.” Narrative 19 (1): 33–50. Charon, Rita. 2012. “At the Membranes of Care: Stories in Narrative Medicine.” Academic Medicine 87 (3): 342–347. Charon, Rita, Sayantani DasGupta, Nellie Herman, Craig Irvine, Eric R. Marcus, Edgar Rivea Colon, Danielle Spencer, and Maura Spiegel. 2016. The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine. New York: Oxford University Press. Frank, Arthur. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frank, Arthur. 2004. “Asking the Right Questions about Pain: Narrative and Phronesis.” Literature and Medicine 23 (2): 209–225. Gubar, Susan. 2017. “A Cancer Memoir of Literature and Science: Living with Cancer.” New York Times, January 12, 2017. Holmgren, Lindsay, Abraham Fuks, Donald Boudreau, Tabitha Sparks, and Martin Kreiswirth. 2011. “Terminology and Praxis: Clarifying the Scope of Narrative in Medicine.” Literature and Medicine 29 (2): 246–273. Holt, Terence E. 2004. “Narrative Medicine and Negative Capability.” Literature and Medicine 23 (2): 318–333. Jurecic, Ann, and Daniel Marchalik. 2016. “Breathing Lessons: Paul Kalanithi’s ‘When Breath Becomes Air’.” The Lancet 388: 2859. Kalanithi, Paul. 2016. When Breath Becomes Air. New York: Random House. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. 2013. “Narratology, Ethical Turns, Circularities, and a Meta-­Ethical Way Out.” In Narrative Ethics, edited by Jakob Lothe and Jeremy Hawthorn, 25–40. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

134  Megan Milota Lenzen, Stephanie Anna, Ramon Daniels, Marloes Amantia van Bokhoven, Trudy van der Weijden, and Anna Beurskens. 2018. “Development of a Conversation Approach for Practice Nurses Aimed at Making Shared Decisions on Goals and Action Plans with Primary Care Patients.” BMC Health Services Research 18 (891). Lipkin, Mack, Samiel M. Putnam, and Aaron Lazare, eds. 1995. The Medical Interview: Clinical Care, Education, and Research. New York: Springer-­Verlag. Martin, Andi. 2017. “ ‘When Breath becomes Air’ by Paul Kalanithi (review).” Canadian Journal on Aging 36 (1): 120–121. Maslin, Janet. 2016. “Review: In ‘When Breath Becomes Air,’ Dr. Paul Kalanithi Confronts and Early Death.” New York Times, January 6, 2016. Miller, Franklin. 2016. “Facing Death.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 59 (4): 581–586. Milota, Megan, Ghislaine van Thiel, and Hans van Delden. 2019. “Narrative Medicine as a Medical Education Tool: A Systematic Review.” Medical Teacher 41 (7): 802–810. O’Keefe, Alice. 2016. “ ‘When Breath Becomes Air’ by Paul Kalanithi Review: How to Live, by a Doctor Who Died Age 37.” The Guardian, February 3, 2016. Rosenblatt, Louise Michelle. 1978. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Rossmassler, Sarah C., and Lauren Gray. 2016. “Book and Media Reviews.” Journal of Palliative Medicine 19 (10): 1123–1124. Sacks, Oliver. 1984. A Leg to Stand on. New York: Harper & Row. Schwarz, Daniel R. 2001. “A Humanist Ethics of Reading.” In Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory, edited by Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, 3–15. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Vannatta, Seth, and Jerry Vannatta. 2013. “Functional Realism: A Defence of Narrative Medicine.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 38: 32–49. Wolff, Janet. 1984. The Social Production of Art. New York: New York University Press. Wooden, Shannon. 2011. “Narrative Medicine in the Literature Classroom: Ethical Pedagogy and Mark Haddon’s ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-­ Time’.” Literature and Medicine 29 (2): 274–296.

7 Exploring new vocabularies in conversations about religion, race, politics, and justice Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin

Knowledge-­making, race, religion, and politics We, the authors, were raised in different households in terms of race, religion, socio-­economic, cultural, and migration histories. What we did share, however, was a sense of alienation at the university in the way religion, critique, politics, and knowledge were engaged with. We were both brought up with an approach of religion (Nawal: Islam, Matthea: Christianity) that did not strictly separate between religion, politics, our personal experiences, critique, and knowledge-­making. No fundamental distinctions were made between these different dimensions: religion could function as critique, the personal was political, and it was considered dangerous to detach knowledge-­making from ethics. Obviously, this attitude was not always practised, because it coincided with other – sometimes opposing – practices and attitudes. Nonetheless, in our families and family histories, it was an important ideal: something to strive for. We define these practices and learned attitudes as part of what others have termed ‘embodied knowledge’. Although knowledge-­making is always embodied, ‘academic knowledge’ often does not reckon with the reality that we cannot separate ‘academic questions’ from the experiences and knowledges of the one articulating such questions. In this chapter we use the term ‘embodied knowledge’ to articulate our aim of explicitly engaging with those epistemologies, experiences, and attitudes that are often not accepted as ‘academic’ or ‘scholarly’: familial histories; individual experiences; affective, political, and cultural memories we carry in our bodies, fragmented as these memories might be. Memories of migration, of loss, displacement, in/exclusion, of being racialised and sexualised in this world. Memories of belonging to (non)-­normative traditions, politics, cultures, religions, communities. It is our argument that when we entered our studies (Nawal: Law, Matthea: History), our embodied knowledge was displaced, repressed, or unlearned. Throughout our academic training, detachment and disengagement were advocated over personal investment, ethical development, or political engagement. The first instruction during Matthea’s History study for example, was: “We can learn nothing from History. Historical

136  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin narratives that pretend we can, are the product of amateurism. They are not works of academic scholarship.” Historical narratives should not aim to intervene ethically or politically, the professor tried to say. Detachment was advocated over political engagement and dissociation over emotional involvement. Personal experiences were hardly ever engaged with as possible sources of knowledge-­making. Although historians would never claim ‘neutrality’, the goal was to remain as neutral as possible: to stay out of the everyday mess of our experiences, politics, and ethics. There were exceptions to this approach, but this detached way of doing History was dominant. Throughout our studies, race or whiteness were scarcely discussed as academically relevant. Neither did we engage with questions of who can legitimately produce knowledge in our disciplines and from which location. Which kinds of knowledges are delegitimised as biased, and which voices can (more) easily inhabit positions of ‘universality’, ‘neutrality’, or ‘impartiality’? Many scholars, critical of these asymmetric relations, have reflected on the interrelation between detached Westernised knowledge-­making and domination. The process in which ‘neutral’ scholars attribute to themselves the power of definition: the capability of systematising, classifying, and categorising ‘Others’ along lines of race, gender, modernity, geography, sexuality, and class, while they remain out of scrutiny.1 Such scholarship produces ‘objects’ of study who can never become ‘subjects’ and speak back on their own terms. Black feminist/womanist and de/postcolonial intellectuals have analysed how this particular way of knowledge-­making is key in (neo)colonial management and the preservation of white supremacy and patriarchy. This chapter is deeply indebted to insights, archives, and canons produced by these critical movements. They have built their own tradition of knowledge-­ making, of composing intellectual texts in a way that seeks to do justice to their insights: to articulate the impossibility of their own subjectivity, as Black and American: W.E.B. Du Bois; as Black and woman: Sojourner Truth; as Arab and Jew: Ella Shohat; as Muslim and scholar: Yassir Morsi; to do justice to the experiences of Others that have been silenced and express the impossibility to fully vocalise these silences: James Baldwin, Marcella Althaus-­Reid, Imre Kertész, Ruth Klüger, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Malcom X, bell hooks, Combahee River Collective, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman. In the Netherlands this kind of engaged intellectual work is practised by people like Anton de Kom, Gloria Wekker, Philomena Essed, and many others. ‘Embodied knowledge’, for us, also includes religion. Although (de)legitimisation of knowledge is often scrutinised in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality, we are also concerned with displacements of ‘embodied knowledge’ on the basis of a religion-­secular divide. We understand this divide as producing borders between acceptable religion (‘religion’ that is separated from the ‘secular’) and unacceptable religion (‘religion’ that transgresses

Religion, race, politics, and justice 137 these boundaries). This divide thus establishes boundaries between ‘religion’ and supposedly ‘secular’ phenomena, such as politics, economics, knowledge-­making, and race. The problem we aim to tackle is the impossibility of academic engagements with archives and experiences that have been termed ‘religion’. Even studies that have deconstructed ‘the secular’ hardly approach archives now labelled ‘religion’ as possible ‘critique’ or ‘theory’ to engage with normatively. This chapter therefore aims at thinking along, against, and within these archives.2 Undoing a religious-­secular divide also helps to take on board topics that are normally separated by this divide. Race-­making (as something supposedly ‘secular’) is often disconnected from Christianity (as ‘religion’). The chapter conversely engages with relationalities between Christian theology and race-­making, between Muslimness and racism, Islam and blackness, Christianness and whiteness. We are thus concerned with embodied knowledge that revokes religion-­ secular boundaries in different ways. On the one hand, we think together topics that are separated by this divide, such as Christian theology and race-­ making. And on the other, we include ‘illegitimate’ religion in our reflections – religion-­as-­critique, religion-­as-­knowledge, religion-­as-­political, types of religion that transgress boundaries that separate between the ‘secular’ (politics, critique, knowledge) and ‘religion’. This approach results in concerns and questions that resonate differently in our individual reflections on Muslimness and Christianness, especially since the white Calvinist tradition Matthea was raised in is historically tied to the Westernised knowledge-­making we aim to undo. Nawal, conversely, has been confronted with its flipside: an academic and public reality in which every aspect of Muslimness can be scrutinised and marked. We aim to undo this type of knowledge-­making that exclusively renders ‘Islam’ the problem, instead of the conditions under which this asymmetric problem-­making can emerge. To reverse this dynamic, the text pauses extensively on how ‘Christian supersessionism’ is implicated in the production of knowledge that fixates Others in a story-­within-­a-­story and renders Others a ‘problem’ or ‘question’ that needs solving. Given this implication, questions of race, religion, and (in)justice affect us differently, so that our individual contributions are deliberately asymmetrical. Instead of analysing processes of in-­and exclusion, this chapter aims at doing knowledge-­making differently. In other words, rather than critically analysing the normative patterns in what becomes accepted and unaccepted ‘academic knowledge’, we have tried to ‘do scholarship differently’. Not only in combining topics that are normally separated, but also in terms of style, format, and setup. Our aim is to explore how to create a different academic vocabulary–  a different style for conversations about religion, race, and politics– that can express the disorderliness of it, but also possibilities of transformation, doubt, and change. In that sense, the chapter is a performance of (our search for) an alternative vocabulary that does not follow straight lines, is dialogical, asymmetric, explorative, relational, and open-­ended.

138  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin Developing a new vocabulary also entails trying to establish a different way of using and engaging with language. We consider language as an essential element in our venture of moving away from ‘detachment’. In our chapter we opt for a more affective usage of language. The text might feel ‘un-­academic’ and may create discomfort. This affective language, however, enables us to precisely show that which is hidden, namely that there is a specific way of ‘doing academia’. Beyond the intersections of race, religion, class, and gender, there are formalities that require those entering academia to act, talk, and write in a certain manner. We did not follow these formalities, but rather approached this chapter as a messy undertaking, and disorganised. As disorganised as the religious traditions we carry with us: traditions, modes of thinking, and practices that strengthen, heal, disrupt, and humble us. Many conversations preceded this article. We’ve had numerous conversations on the interrelations among religion, politics, race, and (views on) justice: how these connections affect us differently, (im)possibilities of moving away from the frames that hold us hostage (differently), and how we engage with the traditions we were raised in. We could not have these talks in the midst of academic spaces, impossible as it often is in academia to easily shift from theoretical reflections to personal experiences, from evolved arguments to thoughts that are half finished, feelings that cannot be fully grasped, or conflicted arguments we sought to plough through. Hence, our talks took place outside and in-­between academic spaces: at the university during lunch and on coffee-­breaks; in WhatsApp and phone conversations; during, after, and before activism or academic meetings; when we ate breakfast or watched TV. We found connection through mutual obsession with Netflix shows that triggered us or made us forget the world around us. If there is one word we can use to describe our ongoing conversation, it would be: unfinished. What we try to articulate and engage with in this chapter, then, may best be described as ‘embodied knowledge in transformation’. Our chapter is slightly different from other written academic articles and chapters, as we are not trying to pose our arguments in three or four neat points that lead to a conclusion. Instead, we are invested in tracing, documenting, and solidifying our genealogies of knowledge through transgressive and reflective conversations. In this we aim to follow Saidiya Hartman’s method of ‘critical fabulation’, which entails the rearranging of basic elements of the narrative, i.e. conversation (Hartman 2008, 2019). The aim here is to unsettle the status of ‘the received and authorised account’ and in doing so create space for thinking with and about knowledge that might be perceived to fall outside the scope and limit of academia. Thus, in the different parts of this contribution, we move sometimes rapidly through different elements of our conversations. We also engage with eclectic sources, the way we did throughout our conversations, easily moving between quotes from books we hold dear, to personal experiences, academic expertise, religious practices and texts, or critique upon and from them.

Religion, race, politics, and justice 139 In the first part we reflect on our displacement within academia but also on the consequences of living in and coming of age in a politically turbulent time where external differentiations based on race, gender, religion, class, and sexual orientations are juxtaposed. We reflect on how our experiences and struggles sometimes were so similar but at other times were completely different. In the second part of the chapter, we articulate how we engage with our religious traditions (differently) in the face of the experienced injustices as expressed in the first part. We struggle with balancing on the one hand the important values and insights we gain from engaging with our religious tradition and on the other hand over-­romanticising and desensitising our religious traditions by silencing the harmful parts. How do we honour, critique, and engage without disregarding and/or over-­simplifying parts of our religion(s)? How do we struggle with these questions (differently)? Is there a liminal space where we can be deeply religious and simultaneously acknowledge that religion can also be harmful? For now, we invite you to read our reflections with an open mind and we hope that the discomfort we feel will seep through the page and capture you wherever you are reading this.

Transgressive reflections and conversations NAWAL I want to explore the many ways I am compelled to be a good or bad Muslim. I have come to dislike the neatness of the good Muslim, in thinking and talking about Islam and racism. I am repetitive and disorganized. I dislike the right angles of angles of today’s scholarship. I hate the performance of a balanced Islam. It is such a lie. The Muslim world is in turmoil and so am I. It is violent. It is regressive. It is burning and harmfully patriarchal and it is beautiful and everything in between. It is in a sense to me partly known and greatly unknown, and I must reject the therapeutic tones of a good Muslim who speaks to help ease (a very privileged) white anxiety and speaks of it through common sense and a flow of premises. (Morsi 2017, 4–5)

One of the reoccurring themes in the discussion we have had over the past three years is the question of how we can re-­politicise religion. When it comes to Islam, in current Western political and societal realities, this wish (or rather, fantasy) of repoliticising religion, i.e. Islam, in a different manner is complicated. Conversations about Islam and Muslims are mainly dominated by the idea that they are incompatible with ‘our’ (‘the Western’) way of living. Articulating a wish for re-­politicisation can easily be seen as a threat because, generally, in the European psyche the archetypical model of Muslim subjectivity became synonymous with violence, aggression, death, and destruction, especially in the post-­9/11 era. The quote by Morsi resonates with my experiences on a different level: it articulates my own experience of growing up as a Muslim in a rural area in the Netherlands, in

140  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin a world that feared and ostracised Islam. Wearing the Muslim headscarf (hijab) all of sudden was not only a religious practice, but also a tool of recognition, which lead people to believe that by wearing the hijab, one was an ambassador of the religion and as such could be interrogated and subjugated to harassment and violence. So, as a child and a teenager I was forced to not only struggle with understanding what Islam meant to me on a spiritual level, but I also had to react to the external need for answers by those who were close to me, as well as complete strangers. Simultaneously, I  was developing a sense of political understanding, and the need within me to rebel like many other teenagers. But in my case, it became apparent to me that because of the global war on terror, my options to experiment with these different parts of my identity were limited. I had to present myself, the Muslim, and my religion, Islam, as peacefully as I could. This meant that when responding to questions or insults about Islam, I  had to watch my tone, my body language, and my message had to be palatable and rational. I had to speak the language of the ‘Enlightenment’ and present myself and my arguments as non-­threatening as possible in order to be heard. Internally, I felt displaced, unheard, and conflicted. I had hoped that by explaining basic religious concepts such as the Ramadan I would create more awareness, but I was wrong. As I matured and entered the university, I decided to just get through the education system as fast as possible without too many obstacles, but I still remember some of the incidents that happened. I remember how one of my professors, during a 9 am class about world politics, asked for my opinion about the stoning of a woman who had allegedly committed adultery in a country in the Middle East or Africa. I remember thinking “why are you asking me for my opinion?”, but not daring to utter those words. I remember acting the good Muslim by trying to explain a situation that I barely understood or knew anything of. I remember all of my fellow students looking at me for explanation as I attempted to give half-­hearted answers. I remember walking away distraught but not really knowing why. This incident has always stayed with me, and it was years later that I was able to recognise how I was being ‘othered’ and held responsible for things that did not have anything to do with me. As soon as I recognised this, I began to look around and examine the initiatives of Muslim activists or listen tentatively when Muslims appeared on Dutch National TV. Over and over I began to see that one archetype of ‘the Muslim’, namely ‘the good Muslim’, was promoted by Muslims and invoked and accepted by non-­Muslims. This figure was then bided against that of ‘the bad Muslim’, the one that refuses to shake hands with the opposite sex, the one that points to the hypocrisy of Western countries in their arguably illegal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, or the one that dares to wear the Niqab. I came across initiatives from people who identify as Muslim, such as ‘#NotInMyName’, an online campaign created by Western Muslims in order to condemn terrorism. These kinds of campaigns try to salvage the

Religion, race, politics, and justice 141 seemingly unsalvageable image of Islam and the Muslim. By being the ‘good Muslim’, they ineffectively tried to distance themselves, but they mainly managed to contribute to the creation of an ‘other’, a ‘barbaric’. When it came to political participation or critiquing foreign policies of countries such as the Netherlands, the lack of power of good Muslims became painfully visible. I  have played the role of the good Muslim and the bad Muslim, never feeling at home in any of those roles because of their rigidity. I have felt suffocated by both of those roles. I was reactionary and I wanted to retaliate by being unapologetic, meanwhile losing myself somewhere along the line. When I was performing my good Muslim act, my explanation for why I, for instance, wore the hijab was articulated through individualistic neo-­liberal logics. I lied to myself and others by saying I wore it because it was my choice. Yes, there certainly is a choice element to partaking or performing religious rituals, but where was God in all of this? And isn’t fasting in the month of the Ramadan first and foremost a religious practice ordained by Allah? Regardless of the choice element, I wondered, would I choose to wear the hijab if I didn’t consider it to be a command from God? I felt like I had overstressed the choice element and downplayed the God element in order to be relatable. And I  missed the communal element as I saw the individual approach become increasingly favoured. I came to detest the ‘neat’ superficial options that I seem to have as a Muslim. There are no bad or good Muslims. I developed my identity in and through a globally politically turbulent period where my religion was at centre stage. I learned to understand that complexities and messiness are at the heart of constructing one’s identity. I no longer feel the need to clean up “the mess that is created by my religion”, to echo the sentiment of a commentator at a panel discussion I participated in. I am learning to be comfortable in feeling uncomfortable. In doing so, I found hope in the Quran and Hadith, I despaired at the state of so-­called Muslim countries, and I felt lost in my own home. I struggle and I will continue to struggle with my religion, how I relate to my religion, how my religion inspires and informs my politics and activism, and how it forms and transforms me. And as I struggle, I will carry the words of the rapper J. Cole: “There is beauty in the struggle, ugliness in the success ” with me. [MATTHEA] I hate the performance of a balanced Islam. It is such a lie. The Muslim world is in turmoil and so am I. It is violent. It is regressive. It is burning and harmfully patriarchal and it is beautiful and everything in between. It is in a sense to me partly known and greatly unknown, and I must reject the therapeutic tones of a good Muslim who speaks to help ease (a very privileged) white anxiety and speaks of it through common sense and a flow of premises. (Morsi 2017, 4–5)

142  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin “I hate the performance of an innocent white Christianity.” This sentence circled in my mind after reading Morsi. Nawal, you write about how Muslims have been fixated into roles of the good (and bad) Muslim. How it feels to be watched, screened, and evaluated – even, or should I say particularly, by teachers in university classrooms. This continuous demand to perform a comforting and neat Muslimness, that diminishes your liberties to experiment, to harshly criticise, be irrational at times, aggressive, or messy, to have secrets, strong beliefs, or regrets. These past few years I  have been wondering about the flipside of this screening gaze: the side I  have been residing in, a side that is white, secular, and Christian. Thinking of how this ‘gaze’ not only fixates others into dehumanising roles but also produces a false sense of self. A self that has ascribed to itself the power to evaluate, judge, and analyse Others, without returning this favour, without acknowledging its own dependency and limitations. Holding onto fictions of innocence, autonomy, and rationality. A self that judges harshly, while the ‘self’ always gets the benefit of the doubt, based on extenuating circumstances, reality’s ‘complexities’. Is it not? In a twisted way, this sense of self diminishes our personhood too, be it asymmetrically. Of course, whiteness comes with power, comfort, privileges, and safety nets, but it also preserves a sense of self that is ‘delusional’ (Glen Helberg): an over-­inflated ego, at once too big to carry and also falsely innocent. Any harsh reminder that implicates this self in a world that is ‘violent’, ‘burning’, and ‘harmfully patriarchal’ is diffused and hushed under comforting blankets of ‘nuance’, ‘distance’, ‘neutrality’, or ‘good intentions’. The gazing self might be in power, but its sense of control is false: it is fragile and small, continuously in need of comfort; not fully matured, like a child, as James Baldwin suggests in one of his essays. But maybe children are better capable of owning their fears, owning the pain they inflict on the playground. “I hate the performance of an innocent white Christianity.” It is a performance I know all too well. I have lived its comforts and complacencies. And I have to say, it is rather easy to maintain. For a long time I thought of myself as part of a minority: a religious minority living in a secular country. Not without reason, I have to add. Some of the things you write Nawal, I  recognise well enough. When I  grew up, I  also felt judged and looked down upon: because I was ‘brainwashed’: because I did not reflect secularity’s self-­image – too religious, too orthodox – because I wore different clothes. I practised Christianity too ‘rigidly’. When I enrolled in acting classes, a very secular and ‘progressive’ space, I was screened, questioned, and judged, while others could inhabit this ‘neutral’ space without any interrogation. My habits, worldview, dress, ethics, and practices were marked, while their particular habits, morals, and beliefs were not up for discussion. I remember a heated debate with a friend who fiercely opposed religious education. “Children should learn to choose for themselves”, he said. Religious education ‘brainwashed’ children. I remember being frustrated, because he could not see his own preferences as particular and biased. As if

Religion, race, politics, and justice 143 there is neutral ground from which to educate children. I tried to articulate this inequality, but it did not come across. I remember my anger and discomfort. Others could ask me the most intimate of questions – about my hopes and fears, life and death, about my family and upbringing, about my daily practices and rituals – while they remained safely out of the conversation. They were neutral, rational, objective – at least, more than I was. I had to prove my ability to think critically, while they self-­evidently possessed this quality. These experiences may resemble some of yours, Nawal, but they are also very far removed from yours. I  never thought of myself as white and middle class, was never forced to do so. I never thought of the relation between wealth, whiteness, and Christianness. Colonialism for me was a far-­away historical episode, not something that continues to influence lived realities today. I did not have to wonder whether I ‘belonged’ to this country or had to prove my ‘worthiness’, integration, or assimilation. I had no idea of how suffocating this country was for teenagers who were refugee, Black, Muslim. “I  have come to hate the performance of an innocent white Christianity. It is such a lie.” The past few years I have difficulty in church when we pray for the sufferings ‘over there’: human rights violations ‘over there’, tragic wars and conflicts ‘over there’. As if ‘over there’ has nothing to do with us, with ‘over here’. As if our worlds are not intricately interwoven. As if ‘we’ haven’t been ‘over there’ for the past few centuries. As if ‘we’ are innocent bystanders, simply caring for the poor, for refugees, for people in need, holding on to Christian faith, hope, and love, in a pool of despair. “God, please, deliver us from evil.” These prayers seem harmless, unrelated to political conflicts and wars, as if Christian theology is apolitical. This innocence and neutrality however, is harmful: it erases the continued importance of colonial histories and racisms today. The performance of an ‘innocent white Christianity’ is, I  think, the very flipside of Morsi’s ‘balanced Islam’. It displaces the losses, anger, and traumas produced by (Christian and secular) racisms and neo-­colonialism, deflecting any real engagement with these repressed injustices. How to disrupt this harmful gaze? For you, Nawal, this is a different question and different struggle than it is for me. We are both forced into parts we do not want to play, albeit with painfully different outcomes and consequences. When we shared our thoughts, our work, our histories, our jokes, our television obsessions the past few years, it felt, at times, like we could step outside of these restricting roles – broaden our playing field, so we could think anew, change, relate and act differently than before, have some moments of relief. Until we entered spaces that were beyond our influence, where lines were being drawn again. Lines that fixate us, unequally, limiting your space much more than mine. I hold on to your J. Cole: “There is beauty in the struggle.” Even though our struggles differ. One story that has helped me in struggling with my tradition is that of Hagar. Not the well-­known biblical Hagar from Genesis, but a forgotten Hagar from the New Testament. She helps me to unthink

144  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin academic neutral grounds and white Christian innocence that have never been there in the first place.

Thinking along, against, and within ‘our’ religious traditions [MATTHEA]When I grew up, biblical figures were like close neighbours to me, living across the street. Their clothes might have been ancient, but their presence was as real to me as the existence of my aunts and uncles, or the beads on my bicycle. Sarah, Abraham, and Moses were part of our everyday life. School days started with a biblical story, and after each meal we read from the bible in turns: about kings with five-­syllable names, prophetic fires of Elijah and Elisha (‘finally a woman-­prophet’, I  thought, not knowing Elisha was a male name), and about many daughters, wives, and strangers, who somehow intervened but were left unnamed. These were not sweet bedtime stories or exciting fairy tales from which we could easily detach. Much was at stake in the world of Daniel, Jeremiah, Job, Esther, and Ruth (justice, wrath, sin), and their world was made into ours. I vouched for them, with them, and against them; they angered and stunned me, incomprehensible as their actions sometimes were. The Bible seeped into our everyday lives, our everyday talks. Jeremy Jennings describes this as ‘reading the world scripturally’ (Jennings 2010). Although he was born into a Black pious Christian family in the US – his concerns very different from mine – I found something deeply recognisable in the way he writes about his parents: ‘I was never able to separate biblical hopes’, he says, ‘from their real hopes. They knew the Bible, but, far more important, they knew the world through the Bible’ (Jennings 2010, 2). Jesus and the prophets were not simple abstractions; they actively participated in our lives, for good and bad. I may be critical of this pious Calvinist tradition today, and it often angers me, but thinking myself outside of it would be as nonsensical as thinking myself outside of my own body. It has constituted my sense of the world, its messiness and incomprehensibility, its beauty and possible futures. Sometimes I wish I had been raised more light-­heartedly, but I am also happy that detachment and cynicism could never grow on me, nor could Disney World versions of the world. The tradition I was raised in provided a space for me where rough edges were not erased, soothed, or vanilla-­fied, similar to the biblical stories that lack neat endings. Although adults tried to fixate Bible stories with moral lessons, or closed-­off theologies, there was no systemic logic in them, no final meaning. The people in the text, including its many writers, were grappling with what they found in front of them, without ever fully grasping the world, each other, or God; without knowing how their actions would turn out. And although many images of God limited the life of a girl living in this male-­centred world, making her smaller, there was also this open-­endedness between God and the world, between God and me; an indeterminate space from which these images could be cracked open.

Religion, race, politics, and justice 145 A few years ago, I started talking about race and Christianity in public, about the backstories of my tradition. I interrogated the close ties between white supremacy and liberal, progressive, and conservative Christian theology. Some people accused me of selling out, betraying my tradition, and ‘my people’: “Christians are already frowned upon by secular society, why increase this critique? Why airing the dirty laundry?” All the while forgetting that many white Christian and ‘secular’ people in the Netherlands share their privileged lives, views, and attitudes in this world. But my critique did not follow from a secular or ‘neutral’ (whatever that may be) stance. I  did not detach myself from my tradition. On the contrary, my concern followed from a commitment to that tradition that I found at once beautiful and deeply problematic. A tradition that had taught me to not evade discomfort and human failure. My religious upbringing helped me to not look away from painful truths and things we would rather forget or repress, and take seriously today’s ‘Black prophetic fire’ (West 2014). Voices, like yours Nawal, that are not easily digestible and lay bare uncomfortable realities as they resist to play the grateful ‘allochtoon’ or ‘Muslim’ and claim justice on their own terms. Confrontations with these backstories are not easy or straightforward. For me they were disorienting and painful, as they expose an ugliness of the lifeworlds that I cherished and loved – an ugliness you were confronted with long ago, and I was shielded from by white, middle class, and Christian privileges. “Tradition always spills over”, Josias Tempo said some time ago. I think he is right. Tradition cannot be contained or controlled. It spills over to unforeseen places, retrieving repressed and hidden memories. One such repressed memory for me is that of Hagar. Not the story of the two wives of Abraham as it was taught at school: Sarah as matriarch of Judaism, Hagar of Islam, always in competition. But rather Hagar as the backstory of a particular Christianity: the Oriental ‘slave woman’ against which the West could envision itself as self-­critical and liberating. Free, like Sarah. Hagar as a story-­within-­a-­story. In the New Testament letter to the Galatians, Paul retells the Genesis story of Hagar as an allegory. He introduces Hagar and Sarah as the personification of two covenants between God and man: the one is a covenant of the law and slavery (Hagar), while the other is of promise and freedom (Sarah): Tell me, you who wish to be under the law, have you been listening to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and one by a free woman. But the slave woman’s son was born according to the flesh, while the free woman’s son was born through promise. These things are an allegory, for these women are two covenants. Hagar represents Mount Sinai [where Moses received the law] in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother. (Gal 4: 22–26)

146  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin While the offspring of the ‘slave woman’ Hagar was born ‘according to the flesh’, Sarah’s son was born ‘through promise’. Consequently, Sarah, the free woman, personifies the true covenant, that of freedom and promise, unbound to the logic ‘of the flesh’, while Hagar represents the Mosaic Law given on Mount Sinai. Although Paul was an observing Jew, his letters have been read as diametrically opposing ‘Judaism’. In such readings, Sarah and Hagar were interpreted as the personification of ‘Christianity’ and ‘Judaism’ respectively, the former leading to freedom, the latter to slavery and despair. Some time ago this Hagar wouldn’t have made any sense to me. I never thought of Sarah as Christian. Nor would I think of Hagar as Jewish, negatively reflecting a Christian Sarah. These associations would baffle and probably annoy me. I was well aware of the anti-­Judaic history of Christianity. The Hagar I knew was from Genesis: the foreign slave woman who was neither backward or inferior. God followed her into the desert, where an angel promised her descendants too many to count and a son who would be free. I did not know Hagar played a very different role in the New Testament, and neither did I know that even my Genesis Hagar had nothing to do with Judaism or Islam. She was shaped by Christian theology, not the Talmud or Hadiths. She was a Hagar seen through Christian eyes. Attempts to interpret Genesis as a Jewish text would not undo this. It would simply ignore the reality of a self-­acclaimed Christian scriptural control, centring Christian concerns, instead of Jewish or Islamic ones. Reading Genesis as a Jewish text, I see now, simply sidesteps a long history in which ‘Judaism’ or ‘reading Jewish’ has been aligned to reading the Bible wrongly. The Jewish Hagar of Paul uncomfortably reminds of Christianity’s self-­ acclaimed supersession of Judaism. Or better, of how important ‘Judaism’ was in Christian interpretations of scripture. Jews, so the argument was, did not understand scripture’s ‘true meaning’. When Jews read Moses’ law, so it was said, ‘a veil is over their eyes’: they are ‘blinded’ for God’s truth. Christians, on the other hand, could see beyond the surface of the text, grasping its deeper meaning, through Christ. Hence, like Hagar, Jews were said to be enslaved by literalism and the flesh, while Christians were free like Sarah, through the spirit. These oppositions between Hagar (letter) and Sarah (spirit) were not minor details of early Christian theology, but crucial tropes to think with. ‘Judaism’ or ‘reading Jewish’ was shorthand for having the wrong orientation toward texts: the body, gender, sexuality, law, the world, and God. ‘Judaism’, in other words, functioned as a mirror image to construct different ideals of Christianness. Sometimes it was outright rejected and considered evil, and at other times it was evaluated more positively. But like Hagar, ‘Judaism’ always functioned as a story-­within-­a-­ story, superseded by a Christian present (Fredriksen 2010). To some extent I knew about this supersessionist hermeneutic, but I was never aware of how far-­reaching its violent afterlives have been; how central this hermeneutic of a story-­within-­a-­story was in European colonial and racial classifications. In the Middle Ages, Islam was interpreted in terms

Religion, race, politics, and justice 147 of supersession as well: it was considered either a return to Jewish law or a lapse into a pagan past. During this time, Hagar came to personify Islam alongside Judaism. This Oriental Hagar negatively (and sometimes positively) mirrored a newly constructed Occident: the Christian West (Akbari 2012). This invented ‘West’ rested on multiple secessions: not only Christianity’s supersession of Judaism but also Christianity’s supersession of Islam, white’s supersession of black, modernity’s supersession of tradition, Protestantism’s supersession of Catholicism, secularism’s supersession of (inappropriate) religion.3 The centre of this ‘West’ has never been stable or fixed, and down the line, Christianity too, has been superseded. I felt out of place too, growing up piously Christian in the Netherlands. I  remember the look in the eyes of ‘secular’ adults when they spoke to me: a look of pity, as if I could not think for myself, as if my critical abilities had been silenced by my upbringing. But I  was not Other to the ‘West’, not in terms of whiteness: my citizenship was never contested, nor were my rights to be where I was. And I was hardly aware of the superseded Others that I could easily judge or analyse, who were a story-­within-­my-­story. People whose ancestors were colonised, displaced, or violated, while their resistance was silenced. ‘Europe’ may be divided along lines of north-­south, east-­west, civilised-­ backward, developed-­poor; so were its racialised Others. The supersessionist ‘West’ distinguished and continues to distinguish between a good and bad Orient, between Western and Arab Jews, between progressive and backward Islam, or assimilable and unassimilable Muslims. In other words, there have been many Hagars and many Sarahs: free Sarahs; Sarahs who have become corrupted or underdeveloped; assimilated Hagars close to whiteness; or backward Hagars closer to blackness and slavery. What remains the same, however, is an underlying hermeneutic of domination and control. Based on the idea that particularised Others supposedly cannot grasp their own nature, histories, languages, and cultures: blinded as they are for their true and deeper meanings (Jennings 2010). This hermeneutic of control fixates Others into a story-­within-­a-­story. Their lives are set out by an omniscient narrator, who screens, evaluates, judges, and analyses them, yet remains invisible. His particular concerns are masked as ‘neutral’, ‘universal’, or ‘academic’. A  narrator, who can see through superseded Others – through the Sarahs, Hagars, and their offspring – to grasp the true meaning of their worship and ways of life. He classifies them, studies them. Detached. Critical. Neutral. At least, more neutral than they are. After all, this knowing I is beyond race or gender. Free. Like Sarah’s son.4 This supersessionist hermeneutic might seem like an obscure theological legacy. Its outcomes, however, are as real today as they were in colonial times. In Radical Skin, Moderate Masks, Yassir Morsi describes how racism exiles people from themselves. How the “white gaze possesses a will to dominate, own, distance or erase” (2017, 11). Racism fixates the Other,

148  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin Morsi says, in a story-­within-­a-­story. The Other can only speak through the master narrative from the outside in, losing her/his own voice. It is like some same omniscient narrator sets the scene for my storytelling. It calls me forward to tell a story about being Muslim. It first highlights the figure of the Muslim as a way to hail us into speaking in its language impregnated by a meaning that is ‘not inside ourselves, but outside’. It sets the themes and expectations, gives us the vocabulary and from that moment we become. (Morsi 2017, 37–38) For Morsi, this master narrative is ‘the War on Terror’ and ‘de-­radicalisation’: a narrative inscribed unto Muslim bodies in many different ways, separating ‘saved’ from ‘oppressed’ women, moderate from radical Muslims, acceptable from unacceptable religion, dangerous from peaceful Islam. This screening, moreover, is not only set out via surveillance in airports, or on the streets, but also in supposedly self-­critical spaces like academia, where Muslims can never fully inhabit the role of ‘neutral scholar’. Despite popular views, Islamophobia is not simply about negative stereotyping, Morsi writes. It “is a productive discourse that defines the Muslim in convenient ways. In doing so, it impoverishes the ability of Muslims themselves to elaborate on what it means to be Muslim” (Morsi 2017, 39, see also Sayyid 2014). Islamophobia, in this meaning, advocates a Muslimness that continuously eases white and secular anxieties. It exclusively tolerates a Muslimness that does not remind of uncomfortable truths of Western (histories of) imperialism, and represses the messy struggles against racism and inequalities. It silences those who question injustices of the status quo. I read the repressed Hagar story as a backstory of what Morsi describes as being stuck in revolving doors – of being fixated, managed, controlled, in a continuously shifting story-­ within-­a-­story. Having to ‘perform’ a neat Muslimness for an anxious white secular and, I would add, Christian gaze. A gaze that renders Islam the problem, instead of the one gazing, instead of this illusory attempt to control. A desire of domination that is particularly valent in anti-­radicalisation research. Such research harmfully “shatters and makes fragments of its subject matter”, since “every aspect of the Muslim life is brought under the microscope of. . . [a] scientific ‘evidence-­based’ approach” (Morsi 2017, 17). It silences the messy realities of Muslims and people perceived as ‘Muslim’, living in the West. The Hagar who was once Jewish and Muslim may help to undo some of these silences. Although associations between Hagar and Islam still hold, the Jewish Hagar has been comfortably forgotten. This backstory Hagar, however, lays bare the presence of the silent ‘third party’ (Hochberg 2016): the omniscient narrator (Christian or secular) who constituted a Hagar as a story-­within-­a-­story of an Oriental slave woman (Jewish and Muslim) as mirror image of the West. This Hagar is uncomfortably reminiscent of how deeply rooted a supersessionist hermeneutic of domination still is in our

Religion, race, politics, and justice 149 everyday lives. How easy it is for white people like me (Christian or secular) to slide into the role of the innocent ‘third party’, to be the one gazing and analysing, with nothing but good intentions. Blameless somehow, and detached. Ignorant of what this gazing does. But tradition always spills over. It not only summons repressed or forgotten pasts; even Hagar-­as-­backstory cannot be fully contained. If I  reread Genesis with this backstory Hagar in mind, she becomes highly disruptive. Not because I can finally grasp a ‘true’ Hagar (authentically Jewish or Muslim), forgetting her Christian afterlives, but rather because she shifts the gaze to the violent outcomes of being a-­story-­within-­a-­story, spilling over to places the reader cannot control or predict. She talks back to me, displaces my false sense of self, and breaks open closed-­off subjectivities. In the Christian Bible, Hagar is the surplus woman. The genealogies of Jesus mention Sarah as matriarch of Israel. Hagar is not included in this lineage. From this perspective, Hagar’s presence is not of any use, but the Genesis text is almost resistant to excluding her: instead, the text cracks open the metanarrative. It pauses upon the story of Hagar, of whom we still know her name, unlike so many other women in the Bible. A name not once mentioned by Sarah and Abraham. They refer to her as “mine” and “yours”, “my slave can give you a child”. Yet, when Hagar flees into the desert and an angel speaks to her directly, he first mentions her name: “Hagar”, he says, “slave of Sarai, where do you come from and where do you go to?” The angel does not deny Hagar’s reality of being unfree, yet he does not define her by that reality. Neither does he fully solve this issue. He tells her to go back, but not without making a promise first: she is promised offspring as many as she can count, and a son who will be “a wild donkey of a man”, whose “hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him.” Is that a way to say her son will be free? Uncomfortably reminding of how much hostility anyone faces who breaks out of slavery? The ‘radical skin’ that Morsi writes about? After this promise, the text states something peculiar: She [Hagar] gave this name to God who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me. (Gen 16: 13) The text suggests it was not an angel who followed Hagar into the desert, but God. More importantly, not only God saw Hagar, but Hagar also saw God. The supposedly blinded slave woman is actually the one truly seeing God. Hence, while Hagar has to be removed from the story, the text gives Hagar the centre stage. Biblical scholar Yvonne Sherwood states that by doing so, the text almost draws attention to the uncomfortable truth of her exclusion (2018). Although she will not belong to the ‘elected people’, she goes through all these significant events before they do. Hagar flees into the desert before Israel will do so. Almost starving, she is shown a well by God. She will birth Abraham’s first son, before Sarah does. And most

150  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin importantly, Hagar speaks with and names God, foreshadowing one of the most important stories of Exodus of Moses and the burning bush where God reveals his name: ‘I am’ (Sherwood 2018, 439–468). I have heard that story endless times, but not once was it coupled to that of Hagar, who had given God this intimate name before Moses did. Eventually, Hagar and Ishmael will leave the centre stage. The text does not evade or hide this uncomfortable truth. Hagar is not some kind of feminist heroine, who is liberated from all oppressions. Both Sarah and Hagar are stuck in a patriarchal storyline, in which their lives are set out to be in competition: Sarah powerless over her own fertility, Hagar powerful as mother yet slave to Sarah, leaving Abraham the innocent third party. Both women are defined by their sons, and no daughter can carry their bloodline. The text states that God protects Ishmael when he grows up, but the offspring of Ishmael has no future in the Bible. Yet, reading the text with Hagar’s Christian afterlives in mind is highly subversive: “You are the God who sees me, and I see You”, Hagar says. The superseded ‘blinded’ Other is the one seeing. When I read these lines with the backstory Hagar in mind, I  lose control over a text that I  can no longer claim as ‘mine’ or ‘ours’. ‘We’, who have claimed power of interpretation based on the supersession of Hagar, are forced to listen. Hagar, conversely, becomes the speaking, seeing, and interpreting subject. The story exposes that a supersessionist sense of self is violent, false, and illusionary; that it rests on an imaginary sense of control that denies mutual interdependency and vulnerability. By centring the Other, conversely, the text shows traces of more open-­ended, life-­affirming subjectivities. Grappling as Hagar does, with what she finds in front of her, leading us to unforeseen places. Like God in the desert. [NAWAL] But this cry – Allahu Akbar – terrorizes the vain, who see in it a project of decline. They are right to fear it, for its egalitarian potential is real: to put men, all men, back in their place, without any form of hierarchy. Only one entity is allowed to rule. God. No other entity is granted this power to exercise against one’s peers or against God. Thus, white people take their place alongside all their brothers and sisters in humanity: the place of simple mortals. We might call this a utopia, and it is one. But to re-­enchant the world will be a difficult task. There is no need to be a believer to interpret this philosophy from profane point of view. Fruitful or not, it’s a wisdom that is completely ‘rational’ and can be supported by all. (Bouteldja 2016, 133–134)

Growing up as a Muslim in a land foreign and yet so intimately known to me has always forced me to reflect on certain religious concepts I was raised with and took for granted. To see my existence in this land as a temporal condition: I was not of this place and would never be of this place. I have learned to belong by learning some cultural traits and by making the language mine, but it never felt real. So many crucial parts of me were at odds with

Religion, race, politics, and justice 151 my surroundings and the expectation projected onto me. Fleeting moments created the illusion of belonging, but a word or a question would crack open this carefully constructed notion of being ‘the same’ as everyone else. Coming of age for me coincided with the rise of what we have come to know now as political Islam. Something so dear to me invoked fear in millions. ‘Allahu Akbar’ spoken in a crowded street can create a frenzy with deathly consequences. Entering public institutions as a Muslim meant being dissected and questioned constantly. I was too young and too idealistic to understand that my explanations of Islam being a religion of peace were falling into deaf ears. I believed in dialogue, in meeting, and in exchange, all the while being blind to power dynamics that still subjugate me. I  questioned the non-­Muslim majority that I encountered, but they rarely have to answer. I, on the other hand, feel obliged to answer, to take away fears, to reassure and to be a moderate Muslim: a Muslim who can be understood and maintained. A Muslim who uses reason and leaves holy texts in the sanctuary of the home. Their position is the default, the universal, whereas my position is that of the peculiar, the oddity, the particular. Slowly but surely, the abundance of explanation ate away the enchantment Islam had for me like moths in old clothes. Islam in my life was reduced to empty rituals performed in haste. However, Allah is the best of planners, and through my activism, books, and conversation with both religious and irreligious people, I was able to find the beauty in Allahu Akbar. Language is limited, and the meaning of Allahu Akbar is hardly conveyed in words and phrases. Bouteldja speaks of the humility of this phrase and its transcended ability, but for me the meaning of this phrase is first and foremost found in rootedness: rootedness beyond materialism, beyond sensory understanding. The power of this phrase lies in the space it can create, a space that is accessible to all willing to prostrate in humility. It is a space with the possibility to transcend, but it is also a space that is grounded; it can help everyone to reflect on their positionality and help manage their ego. However, what does being grounded or rooted look like beyond that which is tangible? Islam has been, and always will be, one of my guiding principles. The phrase Allahu Akbar will always be a reminder of the fact that I am a “stranger or a traveler in this world”; it is the thread that sews every aspect of my life together. I am intrinsically motivated by a need to strive to make this world a more just place. Sometimes I get caught up and stray away from the ‘why’ that is forcing me to act in academia and activism. I get lost in believing in my own righteousness. I lose the notion of ambivalence. With ambivalence I do not mean carelessness. I care deeply, but I also am aware of the fact that my actions might not make a difference, at least not in a direct, linear, result-­oriented way. I am invested in the process of struggling and stumbling with each other and with our traditions. Edward Said writes in Reflection on Exile that: Seeing ‘the entire world as a foreign land’ makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting,

152  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal. (2000, 239) Along the same lines, I believe that independence and detachment are two key criteria that enable reflection on and questioning of our own position, ideas, and traditions. Those willing to engage genuinely with what it means to submit willingly have the ability to cross borders and barriers, to be uprooted and rooted at the same time. Through the sharing of conversations we mitigate across the different cultures, settings, and homes that we have come to call our own. In this metaphorical exile we learn to communicate and to let go of control, so that our conversations transform our understanding of each other and the world we inhabit. Through your eyes and mind, Matthea, I get to reflect and know my own tradition, culture, and home. The external gaze often is harsh and divides us. It assumes that we inhabit different worlds, but Allahu Akbar, a sense of something ephemeral connects us beyond the limits of the exterior.

Conclusion We have attempted to capture all that we shared in conversation throughout the years. It was a difficult but rewarding process. We changed our minds so many times regarding the format and the topics we wanted to reflect on, but we kept returning to religion, academia, positionality, and knowledge productions. We settled for speaking from the heart by being vulnerable and by opening up about our complex realities. We tried to do justice to and articulate the asymmetry of the questions and concerns we have been dealing with, so that more equal conversations may emerge. We hope that we were able to present an alternative way of relating to each other and to important aspects of our material world. We invite you to let go of the illusion of control and to look for commonality even when it is not apparent. We invite you to change the dynamics that hold us in place by flipping them upside down. We invite you above all to create space for messiness and unfinished thoughts. Let discomfort and doubt guide you in a world where everyone seems to be all knowing.

Notes 1 Students who do not fit the normalised, universalised, and neutralised frames in terms of whiteness, gender, class, sexuality, secularity, or (post)colonial histories cannot but reflect on the discrepancies between their own embodied experiences and the ideals of a ‘scholar’ who is supposedly ‘as neutral as possible’ (gender-­less, class-­less, race-­less, sex-­less, meaning: male, white, heterosexual). This asymmetric divide has shaped our academic lives differently: unlike Matthea, Nawal was forced to reflect on race in academia, for example, as she could never enter the realm of ‘neutrality’ of whiteness, while Matthea could sometimes enter that realm.

Religion, race, politics, and justice 153 2 In our understanding of religion-­secular distinctions and the making of that divide, we built on the work of Asad (2003), Mahmood (2005) and many others, who have scrutinized how the ‘secular’ is not ‘neutral’ vis á vis religion, but rather produces particular types of ‘religion’ as acceptable, and delegitimizes other forms as unacceptable. Our approach in this article is also slightly different from what has been termed ‘critical secular studies’, since we aim to not only scrutinize this divide, but also normatively and theoretically engage with archives that have been excluded by the ‘secular’. See for a critical engagement with Asad and Mahmood from a global queer perspective Dahwan (2013). 3 I use the term ‘secularism’ here, in the same meaning as ‘religio-­secularism’. This term does not indicate a particular ideological political stance on church-­state relations here. Rather, the term refers to the making of religio-­secular separation through institutional, discursive, and political shifts, practices, and inventions (see on the term ‘religio-­secularism’, Jansen 2017; Dressler and Mandair 2011). It is understood as producing borders between acceptable religion (‘religion’ that is separated from the ‘secular’) and unacceptable religion (‘religion’ that transgresses these boundaries). In that sense, religio-­secularism is intimately tied to the emergence of the category of ‘religion’: of what came to be considered ‘religion’, including its mirror images of improper religion or non-­religion (such as Judaism, Islam), with which it has been contrasted. 4 For extensive analysis of supersessionism’s implication in race-­making and (neo) colonial knowledge-­making, see the forthcoming PhD dissertation of Matthea Westerduin at VU University in Amsterdam, “Displacements and loss in the Muslim question. Re-­membering the making of race, religion, and whiteness in Europe and its colonies.” (working title)

References Akbari, Suzanne Conklin. 2012. Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100 – 1450. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bouteldja, Houria. 2017. Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Dhawan, Nikita. 2013. “The Empire Prays Back: Religion, Secularity, and Queer Critique.” Boundary 2 40 (1): 191–222. Dressler, Markus, and Arvind Mandair (Eds.). 2011.  Secularism and Religion-­ making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fredriksen, Paula. 2010. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2008. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12 (2): 1–14. Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: WW Norton & Company. Hochberg, Gil Z. 2016. “ ‘Remembering Semitism’ or ‘On the Prospect of Re-­Membering the Semites.’” ReOrient 1 (2): 192–223. Jansen, Yolande. 2017. “Beyond Comparing Secularisms: A  Critique of Religio-­ Secularism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, edited by Phil Zuckerman and John Shook, 369–386. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jennings, Willie James. 2010. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race. New Haven: Yale University Press.

154  Nawal Mustafa and Matthea Westerduin Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Feminist Subject and the Islamic Revival. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Morsi, Yassir. 2017. Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-­Radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-­Racial Societies. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Said, Edward. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sayyid, Salman. 2014. “A Measure of Islamophobia.” Islamophobia Studies Journal 2 (1): 10–25. Sherwood, Yvonne. 2018. “Migration as Foundation: Hagar, the ‘Resident Alien’, as Euro-­America’s Surrogate Self.” Biblical Interpretation 26 (4–5): 439–468. West, Cornel, and Christa Buschendorf. 2014. Black Prophetic Fire. Boston: Beacon Press.

Introduction to negotiating bodies Maria Vliek, Rahil Roodsaz, and Lieke L. Schrijvers In the following three chapters, we study embodied religious transformation by providing an empirical account of how certain practices, attitudes, and (ethical) positionings are learned or unlearned by interlocutors: people moving out of Islam in the UK and the Netherlands (Chapter 8), Iranian-­Dutch dissociations from religion in general and Islam in particular (Chapter 9), and women who converted to Judaism (Chapter 10). Rather than engaging with moral and philosophical considerations involved in the constructions of (non-­)religiosity or settling any theological debates, our interest lies in probing visible practices, knowledges, behaviours, and lived and situated experiences of religious transformation. Coming from these aims, our chapters all build on ethnographic research, using the same methodology of participant observation and in-­depth interviews. First in this section, Maria Vliek aims to bring closer an understanding of what it means to move out of Islam whilst negotiating expectations of religious and secular embodiment. Rahil Roodsaz then investigates embodied practices, attitudes, and processes of irreligiosity and racial (dis)identification among Iranian-­Dutch to trace negotiations of the self in a diasporic context. Lastly, Schrijvers focuses on one specific material religious object, namely the prayer shawl, to unravel emotional, rational, physical, and ethical experiences of women negotiating their position in the Jewish community. We write from a (post-­) secular context in which contestations over religion, race, sexuality, and gender have become prominent in drawing boundaries between progressive and backward, traditional and modern, and emancipated and conservative. It is within the complexities of these public contestations and power relations that the negotiations of religious, racial, and gendered belonging among the interlocutors should be understood. Becoming religious, or disidentifying with religion, are therefore social processes related to questions of belonging as well as the body. These chapters all take as a starting point the embodied, physical experiences that are part of moving in and out of religion. But what is embodiment, and how does such a concept relate to how people experience what

156  Maria Vliek et al. their bodies do? We distinguish between empirical realities we find (and, more importantly, our interlocutors find themselves in) and what ought to be ‘proper’ embodiment in order to belong. Roodsaz explores how bodies take on specifically religious and non-­religious dimensions through performances as positioned in gendered, sexualised, and racialised discourses of (Islamic) religiosity and secularity in the Iranian-­ Dutch context. She traces how bodies are deployed to imagine and maintain a position of non-­ religiosity as well as how bodies are read as belonging to certain categories of religion, race, gender, and sexuality. Schrijvers and Vliek look at perceived ideal types of embodiment (modern and orthodox, religious and secular, respectively) and how people in their everyday performances relate to these and aim to conform to or subvert these ideal types in order to belong. Schrijvers considers what happens when contemporary women convert to Judaism. Her interlocutors had to relate to different ideals and norms about how a Jewish woman should act, and she analyses how they negotiate this through their ritual practice, specifically by wearing (or not wearing) the tallit. Vliek similarly takes as a starting points axes of ideal types and how people negotiate their belonging through their bodies. These ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ bodies consist of a specific set of images (like in Roodsaz’ chapter, these are sexualised, gendered, and often racialised) produced by a discursive mode of power which defines a proper set of behaviours, knowledges, and dispositions to which an individual should ascribe in order to be properly considered ‘one of us’, as opposed to ‘one of them’. The lived realities of embodiment, on the other hand, more generally include what the body in fact does and the ambiguous spaces people inhabit: how do people negotiate belonging while not wanting their bodies to conform? In these chapters then, the body is contested in the sense of belonging. It is also an ethical and emotional body, and by empirically investigating ‘what happens’ in those ambiguous spaces of religious change, we hope to further our understanding of (non-­)religious experiences in times of transformation. Questions of belonging and visibility (or ‘being seen’), then, become relevant when transformation is experienced. In the age of individualisation of religion, of privatisation of spiritual experience, of ‘religion behind the front door’, these chapters examine the dynamics of belonging. How implicit these dynamics may often be, as noted earlier, they become particularly visible when bodies are transforming. For people who move between and within different religious groups, questions of belonging become particularly pertinent. For the interlocutors of Vliek and Roodsaz, disassociating from Islam comes with a whole range of questions: Can I discuss my religious doubts with my family? Should I  now drink, have sex, or ridicule religion? For people coming to religion, such as the Jewish converts in Schrijvers’ chapter, belonging and practice are similarly related. Converting bodies negotiate their space in community, while Jewish communities simultaneously negotiate their position toward newcomers  – and in the same vein define the boundaries of inclusion. The people we discuss in these chapters all move

Introduction to negotiating bodies 157 in and out of religion, and all negotiate their position vis-­à-­vis an imagined secular other and the desire to form the self as a modern and liberated subject. This negotiation is not open ended but related to broader social mechanisms. In Roodsaz’ chapter, Iranian non-­religious people’s desire to belong to a space of modernity and freedom is impacted by processes of racialisation and questions of religious and racial (non-­)belonging. Schrijvers’ research participants relate more explicitly to a discourse of women’s emancipation and freedom, while they strive to be recognised as a Jewish woman while negotiating traces of patriarchal Judaism. Lastly, Vliek’s interlocutors uphold a rather normative notion of what non-­religious selfhood would look like, but at the same time recognise continuing ethical and emotional bonds with Islam. As such, spaces of belonging are negotiated and questioned in these upcoming chapters. By examining these liminal spaces, we aim to answer questions about how these expectations over religious and secular embodiment were desired, aspired, or resisted in self-­making in times of religious transformation.

8 (Re)Negotiating embodiment when moving out of Islam An empirical inquiry into ‘A Secular Body’ Maria Vliek Introduction When religious and secular boundaries are discussed, from both secular as well as religious perspectives, it is often the bodily praxis and behaviour that is referred to as being incompatible or at least fundamentally different: donning of a headscarf or face veil, prohibition or consumption of alcohol and pork, modest dress versus miniskirts, differences in sexual morals, debates surrounding circumcision, and hygienic custom. With such choices or acts, our bodies have the ability to communicate to the outside world what we stand for, believe in, or want to conform to. In singular form, they can be our personal canvas, or when viewed in plurality they can tell us something about a group, community, or society at large and the power these exert over us. We have expectations of what bodies ought to look like and inscribe meaning to the exteriors of those we see around us. These expectations are strongly intertwined with whom we consider to be part of our in-­group or those we view as part of the out-­group, a differentiation that has become particularly salient in the presence of Islam in contemporary Europe. In addition, the debates on the boundaries of what is secular or, more specifically, what is deemed appropriately religious in a secular environment, have in recent decades primarily focused on the presence of the ‘Muslim Other’. These discussions in the public sphere often play out on the visible: bodies, the presumed ideology or values they stand for, and their alleged (in)compatibility with a secular system or values. Indeed, ‘being Muslim’ and its bodily performance is highly contested in European spheres. Both religious and secular discourses ascribe certain features to what it means to be Muslim. Islamic voices may do so to demarcate the contested ‘own’ and secure a sense of belonging, whilst the secular may do so to demarcate what is ‘other’ (and thereby implicitly self; see Amir-­Moazami 2013, 2016). During my fieldwork, among people who have grown up in Islamic communities but now no longer believe in Allah in both the Netherlands and Britain, it quickly became quite clear that ‘moving out of Islam’ (Van Nieuwkerk 2018) in fact entails more than letting go of ‘faith’ alone. As I explore elsewhere (Vliek 2019), matters of social, political, ethnic, and gendered intersections, in addition to religious ones, play a

160  Maria Vliek role in narratives of transforming lives affected by a loss of faith. This chapter will further investigate what happens when the alleged boundaries and demarcations between religious and secular become blurred, by exploring how bodily praxis and behaviours are renegotiated by people moving out of Islam in both the Netherlands and Britain. Fieldwork has been conducted over 18 months in 2017 and 2018, during which 44 people have been interviewed, 22 in the Netherlands and 22 in Britain, on their experiences of moving out of Islam. In my interlocutors’ narratives, questions of believing and belonging became particularly salient in light of the bodily behaviours that were perceived by self and others to either ascertain or terminate one’s membership to the religious or secular environs. Moreover, as will become clear, whilst (internalised) discourses may have particular expectations of what a certain body ought to look or behave like, those travelling between the religious and secular spheres (re)negotiated these expectations to form their own sets of bodily behaviours in very individualised ways. The central aim of this chapter is to highlight the embodied aspects of moving out of Islam and how presupposed characteristics of both religious and secular bodies informed my interlocutors’ spiritual transformations. I pursue this by first, outlining the debate on ‘a secular body’ (i.e. Hirschkind 2011). Second, I will provide empirical insights into my interlocutors’ negotiations over their religious upbringing and its perceived dispositions, and how breaking the rules, i.e. performing transgressive behaviour, was often an intrinsic part of moving out of Islam as a demarcation of a new non-­ believing self and the religious other. Third, I  will elaborate on what my interlocutors considered to be either religious or non-­religious practices, knowledges, and behaviours, and their contemplations over adopting or not adopting such dispositions. The term ‘non-­believing’ is used here specifically to indicate a contrasting position my interlocutors described in relation to their previous Muslim in-­group, based on a lack of belief in a higher being. The term ‘non-­religious practices’ is used to indicate certain dispositions that were often deemed theologically or socially forbidden in one’s Muslim in-­group, relating to secular embodiment which I  will extensively discuss as follows. These two empirical sections are designed to show two things: first, how belonging to family was often dictated primarily on visible bodily knowledges, practices, and behaviours of what a (religious) body ought to be, illustrating the relevance of embodiment when moving out of Islam; and second, how secular and religious bodies then inform self-­making in times of religious transformation.

Moving out of Islam and the search for a secular body Drawing on Erving Goffman (1956), who proposed the idea of performance of self in both front and backstage, Bryan S. Turner (1984) has argued that we perform with our bodies various roles or identities in different settings

Negotiating embodiment moving out of Islam 161 of life. He thereby assumed that appearing ‘normal’ creates fundamental feelings of security and belonging. As Lynn Davidman (2015) notes in her study on formerly orthodox Jews: “In every cultural context, the prevailing values, norms, and rules become internalized as habitual, embodied practices. The performance of these daily physical practices creates boundaries between members and nonmembers of a particular group” (203). Davidman further argues that this secure identity, of being part of a group, can fall apart when one begins to feel “a significant distance between bodily routine and self-­identity”, such as when faith is lost and those daily practices are no longer meaningful (17). Davidman shows the importance of embodiment in losing faith, especially among orthodox communities.1 As Davidman’s work also indicates, studies into religious practices, rituals, and embodiment have been quite common throughout sociology and anthropology. However, such research has not been so abundant when discussing ‘the secular’. However, recent scholarship into the secular has started to go beyond the traditional idea of ‘the secular’ as only referring to the institutionalised power of the modern nation-­state and its relation to religion. Inspired by the works of Talal Asad (2003), scholars have taken up the task of investigating the secular as being entangled with affect, emotion, and embodiment, especially in relation to Islam (i.e. Asad 2011; Fadil 2009, 2011; Hirschkind 2011; Mahmood 2013; Amir-­Moazami 2013, 2016). Charles Hirschkind (2011) confronts the question of ‘a secular body’ head on, by asking whether it exists: “is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium . . . specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of what we call ‘secular society?’ ” (633). He reckons that the works that had been proposed on the religiously pious sensorium  – notably Talal Asad’s, Saba Mahmood’s, and his own – provide a useful model to think about “the interrelation of knowledge, practice, and embodiment within a tradition” (535). Through the reading of the works of Asad and William Connely, Hirschkind attempts to draw closer to the idea of a secular body. He views the secular in relation to religion, as a distinct mode of power, “one that mobilizes the productive tension between religious and secular to generate new practices through a process of internal self-­differentiation” (643). Schirin Amir-­Moazami (2013) proposes to include the analysis of ‘religiously connoted transgressions’ in secular societies, which may reveal some ideas of the constitution of a secular body. She takes ‘the secular’ to mean two things: first, the regulative state practices, and second, “a more tacit and often unmarked set of secular affects prevalent in the social practices of secular societies on various levels”,2 which she calls ‘secular embodiments’. She shows how public controversies such as the face veil (2013) or male circumcision (2016) bring these two dimensions together. By analysing what the critiques within such controversies reveal about those who contest public expression of religion, she is able to discern that the secular body concerns shared conventions of “gender mixing, exposing parts of the body . . . while hiding others, notions of gender and sexual freedom, gendered conventions

162  Maria Vliek of visibility and, more generally, habitualized forms of communication in public” (2013, 93). Amir-­Moazami argues that these particular forms of embodiment are not established in isolation; rather, they are anchored in modes of power and “depend on their constant iterations”. Secular embodiment, according to Amir-­Moazami, can in fact materialise, stabilise, and become visible, but “only through such religiously connoted transgressions”. In other words, how secular power debates and demarcates the religious from the secular, reiterates and reveals what secular embodiment is. Such public controversies can be a “reiteration of secular conventions and embodiments” (94). I  agree with Amir-­Moazami’s analysis and laud her attempt at materialising theory through empirical enquiry. However, I wish to further flesh out what she calls the ‘effective stabilization of embodiment’. How do people (re)negotiate these stabilisations and expectations of what a secular body ought to be, having previously acquired a particular religious embodied set of dispositions, when moving out of Islam in Europe? Nadia Fadil (2009) previously addressed such consequences of stabilisations of embodiment, by examining the ways in which religious and secular affects become a source of concern for practising and non-­practising Muslim women in Belgium. She argues that in order to draw closer to an understanding of what the secular may constitute, rather than to simply posit that “a liberal and secular context authorises all kinds of moral offences, what should be examined is the kind of moral offences that are deemed problematic and the kinds of offences which are normalised” (442). She suggests that not only should ‘the offended’ be examined, but also the ‘offenders’, in her case Muslim women who do not shake hands and those who do not fast: offenders of secular and religious sensibilities, respectively. In line with these discussions, I take a secular body to be a set of presupposed characteristics which are ascribed to a body which follows secularism as ideology, whereby I understand secularism to refer to the ideological program that strives to complete separation of religious and secular domains, as well as their co-­constitution. Thereby, this set of characteristics is not necessarily an empirical reality applicable to anyone who is non-­believing as such, but rather produced by a discursive mode of power which defines a proper set of behaviours, knowledges, and dispositions (Hirschkind 2011) to which a secular individual should ascribe in order to be properly considered ‘one of us’, as opposed to the religious (i.e. Islamic) ‘one of them’.3 As my interlocutors will show, this concept and its construction are intertwined with methods of embodied ‘othering’ in contemporary Europe and thereby the relationships between sexuality, race, and religion (Balkenhol, Mepschen, and Duyvendak 2016; Garner and Selod 2015). A ‘secular body’ is a conceptual term I employ to refer to these constructions rather than a lived reality. The lived realities of embodiment encompass behaviours, lifestyles, emotions, and more generally what the body in fact does. Indeed, in what is to follow, it will become clear that the particulars of a conceptual ‘secular

Negotiating embodiment moving out of Islam 163 body’ reveal itself in the transformation of individuals moving out of Islam as a set of characteristics which different actors ascribe to what one now ‘ought to be’. This ‘secular body’ influences the various strategies people employed to (re)train the body in a non-­Islamic framework. Empirically then, ‘a secular body’ becomes traceable in my interlocutors’ descriptions of behaviour, knowledges, and dispositions of ‘ex-­Muslims’, atheists, Western people, whiteness, or non-­Muslims, both from their own perspectives, as well as from their Muslim communities. These descriptions are in turn produced by that distinct mode of power: the dominant ‘secular’ discourse. I therefore take secular and religious bodies to represent two sides which demarcate what is considered ‘the incommensurable divide’ (Mahmood 2013).

Religious upbringing, performing (non-­)religion, and questions of belonging Much has been written about religious morality and specifically on Muslims who wish to be pious, obedient, and moral subjects, where emphasis has been placed on the role of one’s body and ritual (i.e: Hocke 2014; Mahmood 2004). However, Samuli Schielke (2010) argues that, like for most of humankind, many Muslims are not always pious, moral, or disciplined. Although in response, Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando (2015) warn for the exclusion of piety altogether from the anthropology of Islam by redirecting our attention to the ‘everyday’, as Schielke suggests, how morality is expressed through the ambiguities of especially embodied religious discipline was relevant for my interlocutors. They often presented their upbringing and experiences with religious prescriptions as ideal types of performance of religious practice. In their contemplations over religious obligations, there are two motivations for adherence to be discerned: first, the pious obligation to Allah to perform ritual and other embodied praxis, and second, the desire to conform to one’s community through embodiment. Intertwined with these concerns were the images that religious surroundings perpetuated about non-­believers. I will discuss these matters by exploring some of my interlocutors’ ponderings, which show that questions of belonging became relevant through the performance of transgressions of certain religious embodiments and practices which were considered non-­negotiable. Maya,4 a resolute young woman I  met in central London for a cup of coffee, had had a difficult time letting go of the fear of Allah and hell when moving out of Islam. She particularly emphasised modesty and described her discomfort with both social belonging as well as the guilt and fear she felt towards Allah and the potentially disastrous consequences her transgressive actions could have for her soul. She explained: So for example, having sex is a massive thing for a woman to do, and I did that as a Muslim woman. . . . Sex before marriage is haram. . . . It’s

164  Maria Vliek your mother and your grandmother that tell you: ‘don’t have sex, no one’s going to marry you, you’re dirty, it’s not what Muslims do’. She told me what happened when she did break these taboos: “These things came back to haunt me as a university student, during my first sexual experiences, and it was like I’d do it, and I’d feel bad about it. I think: ‘Oh my God, I’m going to hell’ ”. For Maya, moving out of Islam had much to do with these body politics, and particularly the judgment she experienced from other Muslims, which led to her final de-­identification as Muslim: “If people would think that I’m not Muslim enough, then fine, I wouldn’t be a Muslim. And I guess in a way it was sort of pragmatism got the better of that guilt and conflict”.5 Furthermore, for some the donning of a head scarf was a very visible, non-­negotiable performance of belonging. ‘Unveiling’, according to their Muslim community, was sometimes considered to be a performance of waning faith. For example, Sara told me that she still donned the scarf when visiting her family and lied to her mother about living with her boyfriend. Sara was quite traumatised by what she perceived to be religious rules imposed on her: “I remember how I changed from before to after hijab. . . . Once I wore it, I literally retreated into myself, because everybody treated me differently”. To stress the importance of the visibility of personal religiousness in the scarf, she continued: “taking it off is worse than never wearing it at all, because it’s more insulting to the religion [like] that: ‘look you were religious and now you’re overtly non-­religious’, it is almost like a public rejection”. When Sara was about 12  years old, she told her mother she wanted to stop praying, to which her mother responded to be ashamed of her daughter, having raised her this way. This made Sara feel so guilty that she became ‘very strict’ in the performance of prayer, fasting, wearing the hijab, and never talking to boys. This mostly embodied praxis eventually took the better of her, especially after she discovered that all her prayers over the past five years had not been counting since she had washed her hands in the wrong order: I was crying my eyes out thinking, ‘God has not collected any of my prayers?’ . . . So I had a huge board with a mark, every time I ticked off an extra prayer that I had done. . . . And I just remember I reached a certain point, like, half the board was covered, and then I was like, I  stopped doing them.  .  .  . On the outside I  was still the person, the perfect Muslim girl, but on the inside I just stopped caring in a way.6 Sara’s story illustrates the consequences that embodied religious practice can have on the individual. Depending on how negotiable these sets of practices are, the visibility of these embodiments can cause friction with the environs when they are seized or questioned. Since Sara did not want to damage her relationship with her mother and sister, she concealed her

Negotiating embodiment moving out of Islam 165 unbelief from them, continuously performing what was considered a proper religious body in order to belong. The ultimate ‘sin’ or transgression of religious behaviour, according to many, was becoming a non-­believer, or ‘apostasy’.7 Fahad, a Dutch banker from the West of the country, explained: In my experience the image exists that ‘he is no longer a Muslim, so he is totally out of control,8 he will do anything that is forbidden now, he has completely gone of the rails’, you know? There is a huge variety in moral interpretations, fine, but one who openly apostatises? He has completely lost his mind, done something very wrong.9 According to many Muslims Fahad knew, various ways of non-­religious behaviour were accepted to some degree; ambiguity and transgression of the religious norm were considered part of life. Leaving one’s religion, however, could be seen as becoming without any morality. Tariq similarly elaborated: “Because you’re a teenager you’re doing dumb stuff, like a lot of people are sneaking in alcohol or smoking or whatever, but there’s also this like, ‘oh but we all believe in God.’ ” When he first openly talked about his non-­ belief, he thought that because of the way that his friends would practice – “more of a trying to be good, but you can enjoy yourself and think, I’ll be religious later on”  – his internal convictions about the existence of God would not be an issue. However: It’d be boys in school, who’d be sleeping with girls, drinking on the weekends and things like that saying to me: ‘you’re a bad Muslim, you’re not a Muslim, you’re going to go to hell’, shit like [this], and this was at a point where I  didn’t drink: ‘technically I’m a better Muslim than you guys’.10 When people did openly discuss their non-­belief with their surroundings, a common response was that they were thought to have strayed temporarily. Eymen, a young Dutch student, elaborated: Some found it ok, others found it unacceptable. They said: ‘I can deal with it, but let’s not talk about it, just act normal’. Normal? What is that? Because in the end, these are guys that visit prostitutes every weekend. Yeah, what do you mean ‘act normal’.11 Notably, Eymen’s friends use terminology that indicates the performativity, the embodiment of belonging: ‘act normal’ (Dutch: doe normaal). Tariq’s and Eymen’s examples are particularly interesting, since in their friend groups, various parts of religious morality and idealised behaviour were available for negotiation and transgression. However, openly discussing their non-­belief was a non-­negotiable act: by doing so, according to

166  Maria Vliek their friends, they placed themselves outside of what their peers considered to still be ‘acceptable’ or ‘Muslim’. This distinction also reflects their own rationalisations and negotiations over behaviour and convictions required for social belonging. These examples illustrate how negotiations over what is deemed proper or transgressive bodily behaviour coloured my interlocutors’ trajectories out of Islam, norms that differed per situation. Moving out and what that entails became particularly visible in what was considered non-­negotiable by self and others and the transgression of religious behaviours, knowledges, and practices. This took various forms: be it Tariq or Eymen saying out loud to their friends they no longer believe, Maya no longer wanting to comply with rules of modesty, or Sara continuing certain practices in front of her family. These examples were performative acts, or refusals to perform such acts, that made statements to the self as much as they did to others about moving out of Islam. What was deemed religious and non-­religious embodiment raised questions about and triggered negotiations of belonging. Body politics were in these cases particularly problematic for those for whom change in embodied behaviours was more visible and where deviation of certain norms would signal waning faith to religious surroundings. In these examples, this visibility was differently experienced by men and women. For Tariq and Eymen, the non-­negotiable was concentrated on the act of ‘apostasy’ only perceived as such when they would actually say they no longer believed, whereas for Maya, for example (the control of), her womanhood and female embodiment were central to her Islamic belonging in the form of ‘modesty’. For some of the men, it was rather about the alignment of saying one is no longer Muslim and the construct of the ‘no longer Muslim, non-­believer’ who is considered to be without morality, that would signal social (un)belonging. This does not mean that men did not find issues when visible knowledges, practices, and embodiments changed, or that all women struggled equally with such issues. Rather, it shows that expectations of what a body ‘ought’ to look or behave like, both religious and secular, may have gendered aspects.

The blurry lines of moving out: ‘Do I have to become completely Western now?’ In this section, I will elaborate on the contemplations some of my interlocutors shared with me when discussing their religious dispositions or practices, and how these either lingered for some time subconsciously, or how they were consciously retained in processes of self-­making. Whilst the previous section outlined conscious transgressive performance of embodied acts as to make a statement of change of conviction and belonging to both self and others, this section will focus on the (im)possibilities and desires that coloured such contemplations. It will thereby illustrate how some of the dispositions of an embodied lifestyle that one is raised with can be experienced

Negotiating embodiment moving out of Islam 167 as non-­negotiable by the self. It will also show that performance of change was not always desired nor possible. This was both with regard to processes of differentiation and contemplations over belonging as described earlier, as well as an incapacity to unlearn behaviours one was brought up with. Some of my interlocutors showed how they wished to continue their performance of religious identity even though they no longer believed, or that they were unable to stop certain behaviours and embodiments that were previously tied to religious convictions. I  will also share some of their negotiations when it came to what they considered to be certain non-­religious behaviours. These two sections are presented as two sides of the same coin and are highly intertwined. What about those religious dispositions? Born in a large town in the north of the UK, Haroon grew up in a community that was mostly Muslim. He was raised in an Islamic household, and although during his childhood he did not really consciously think about religion, he prayed his namaz, five daily prayers, from a young age. Becoming increasingly religious when going to secondary school, he also started to include the nafl salat, an optional morning prayer, in his daily routine. After school, he went to Madrassa like most of his classmates. He explained: At that young age, you just do how you are brought up. . . . In my community, being a Muslim is not an issue, because it’s usually when it is in contrast to another population that it is very different. . . . You don’t think about it much. Losing his religion was both an intellectual process as well as partially made possible by physically moving away from the community to go to university: “identity, that question comes when you’re not around people like you. . . . A lot of my personality was shaped after I went to university”.12 Haroon lost his faith over the course of a couple of years, from still living at home to some years after he had joined university. For him, religion was very much an integrated way of life in the Islamic community in which he had grown up. When I spoke with him, Haroon described himself as an atheist. He explained to me how, even when he reckoned he did not believe anymore, he continued some of his prayers at university: When I started, I was still doing juma [Friday prayers]. That was a habit of mine that was in my culture, right? So, even if you don’t pray, all the boys go to Friday prayers, I mean, you sit after, you talk about whatever is going on in your life. I’d still go, but obviously, I didn’t mean [it]. This was partly out of habit and partly out of social pressure: “I didn’t have to, it was my way of, something I was used to”, or “when I used to come

168  Maria Vliek home for the holidays, . . . they might turn a blind eye if I wasn’t praying the other prayers, but Friday afternoon you have to. I’d have to go”.13 It is interesting to note how Haroon is presenting his negotiations over practising certain rituals, as well as his rationalisation of continuing such religious dispositions. He reflects on his process of negotiation in self-­ understanding: ‘I’d still go but I didn’t mean it’. Instead of performing his non-­belief by not praying, he described this episode as insincere performance. When a performative act was not sincere, in his view, it did not count as performance of conviction and was therefore not problematic. Other examples of negotiations over religious embodiments were given by Tariq. When he realised he no longer believed, he felt: It’s like The Matrix film, where he wakes up. . . . All the morals, all the rules I had been taught, ‘oh, they are not real anymore’. . . . Even when I  was comfortable as an atheist, there’d be things that I  would find myself doing. ‘Oh, wait a minute, I’m only doing this because it’s an Islamic rule, I don’t have to do it’.14 Examples he gave concerned modesty (‘virginity is this pure thing’), alcohol (‘when I drink I still feel really bad’), and halal food (‘I wouldn’t eat non-­ halal, even though I was no longer Muslim’). These examples illustrate the relative availability of negotiable behaviours and embodied practices. Some of the dispositions one was raised with are non-­negotiable, although they may become available later in time. I met Naveed in Camden, London for a couple of beers in the pub. A young, well-­travelled researcher, he had actually re-­appropriated certain religious knowledges, practices, and embodiments to ‘make sense’ within a non-­religious lifestyle. For example, he saw benefit in prayer, a practice he now called ‘meditation’. He further espoused a healthy lifestyle, which included avoiding pork, and continued to perform the bodily hygiene, originally taught to him to aid religious rituals that he was raised with. Other interlocutors mentioned the value of Eid celebrations as family time; they would still attend and practice where required in order to belong. Some were at ease with the idea of not believing in, yet celebrating a religious holiday with family. Others felt like they were cheating a bit, like one of them explained: “I didn’t fast, so I didn’t try my best. . . . I haven’t actually deserved it!”.15 When I  asked Haroon about values in his community, he gave me an example of internalisation of those community values and how he was still battling to adopt what he called ‘liberal values’: So to give you an example, a girl wants to go out with some guy and have sex with him. On a principle level, go for it. But the culture level in my upbringing, I’m very, to put it lightly, disinclined towards that. My young sister would wear a really short skirt or something,

Negotiating embodiment moving out of Islam 169 I’ll have severe reservations about that. And I can see that that’s not right of me. Haroon sighed at some point during our conversation: I still am a part of it, I’d be lying if I said I don’t care. It’s part of me. . . . I mean, a lot of my culture is still remarkably quite Muslim. . . . You go to shisha places, we’d talk. You never drink.16 It is important to note how for Haroon the internalisation of what he deemed to be certain religious ethics, and the desire to adopt a different set of liberal or non-­religious practices, were related. It was not a clear-­cut line between ‘letting go of what’s religious’ and ‘adopting what’s secular’. Rather, he presented this process as being two sides of the same coin. Also, note how he labels a distinction between ‘on a principle level’ and ‘on a cultural level’, reflecting what he now deems should be his convictions, i.e. girls and boys wanting to have premarital sex or his sister wearing a ‘really short skirt’, dispositions and behaviours he ascribes to being non-­religious or secular embodiment. His ‘severe reservations’ reflect his incapacity to ascribe to this set of what he deems to be non-­religious embodiments. These characteristics already give some clues as to what, for Haroon, a ‘secular body’ is. In these examples, we see elements of knowledges, behaviours, and practices of Islam that were retained, either consciously and willingly, or out of an incapacity to (currently) overcome them. There are two observations to be made here. First, we can see how my interlocutors actively (re)negotiated knowledges, behaviours, and embodiments in processes of self-­making. Second, these ponderings were about certain expected transformations of behaviour in light of changing existential convictions. My interlocutors were expecting themselves to change in one way or another – for their bodies to stop performing what were deemed religious embodiments – in order to become non-­religious. To what extent this was desirable or even possible differed per situation. However, these particular expectations where discomfort and negotiation become evident give us the first clue on a secular body: it was emphatically seen as the absence of religious praxis and behaviour. The following section will further show how that absence also implied a presence of something else. And what about a ‘secular body’? As shown previously, my interlocutors (re)negotiated particular religious knowledges, behaviours, and practices by both transgressing or conforming to religious expectations of embodiment, as well as by identifying the absence of religious praxis and behaviour as being part of a non-­religious constitution. In this section, I will elaborate on attempts at adaptation of what was seen as a particularly ‘secular lifestyle’  – the other side of the

170  Maria Vliek coin – by my interlocutors referred to as ‘Western’, ‘real Dutch’, or ‘white’. It should be stressed, as Haroon’s contemplations have already shown, that these negotiations are highly intertwined. Nonetheless, this section will highlight that whilst a particular (conceptual) ‘secular body’ was acknowledged, it did not necessarily mean that my interlocutors found it either possible or desirable to embody it. When my interlocutors told me about how they view the ‘Western lifestyle’ and their concerns for adopting it partially or fully, there were two levels of concern: first, external frames on ‘ex-­ Muslims’ who had supposedly crossed enemy lines and the animosity that could create with family, and second, disagreement or discomfort with what they deemed non-­Islamic practices. These examples will give direct clues of what are considered knowledges, practices, and embodiments from ‘the other side’ – clues as to what a secular body ought to be. As Tariq explained, it was hard for him to behave according to his new worldview. Since he had grown up in an environment that was natural to him and the practices were performed almost unnoticed, his re-­evaluation of both parts of this ‘worldview’, as well as the supposed accompanying behaviour, went gradual. Part of this was not just letting go or holding on to certain Islamic practices as described, but losing faith also forced him to evaluate the things that he would want to believe or stand for instead. Asking Tariq about gender relations, he responded: A lot of people in my dad’s family . . . say they are all for gender equality, but . . . in the Qur’anic sense, which is like gender equality from 1400 years ago. . . . I always felt men should do the same as women. He reckoned that outside of Islam, gender equality would be more ‘natural’, but: “I realised, Islam is sexist, and I don’t want to be sexist. And then I realised: ‘oh, western sexism is just [the same], it’s still there’ ”. Another example he gave to explain his disillusion was that when he was younger growing up in a Muslim community: “I always wanted to be Western. . ., at the centre I wanted to be a white person, I thought that would be good”. But, when he went to college where he was surrounded by ‘Western, white people’: “there was a guy and he called me a fucking Paki. And then I realised, it was the sort of thing that you missed”. It is important to note Tariq’s construction of ‘whiteness’ here. For Tariq, whiteness and being Western had been opposed to his own Islamic community in which he grew up. In European discourse, religion, specifically Islam, and modernity have been constructed as each other’s antagonists. In this case in Britain, furthermore, these discourses have been coloured, too. Whiteness and ‘being Western’ have been located in the non-­religious modern, whilst ‘being brown’ or ‘Paki’ are associated with the Islamic realm.17 For Tariq, having lived in an Islamic pocket within a dominantly secular society, being part of the dominant ‘white modern’ had been something to aspire to. Realising that ‘whiteness’ may also include sexism and racism,18 characteristics of what he

Negotiating embodiment moving out of Islam 171 thought to be the Islamic realm, he started to explore his ethnic background (i.e. non-­religious): “reclaiming identity that I have been trying to run away from for so long”.19 Haroon had similar struggles, which he pronounced slightly differently. He elaborated on issues of (gender) equality. Between his parents, he saw how his mother had to cook every day, which he found quite normal. HAROON:  So

I’d be lying if I suddenly thought in terms of: ‘this shouldn’t happen’. . . . Later on I thought that this is actually really wrong. . . . Part of that is also because I went to university and had a lot of [exposure] to non-­Muslim people. MARIA:  Exposed to other ideas in that sense? HAROON:  Yeah, but there is an element of danger. You don’t want to suck up too much to another culture. . . . You should look at each [issue] piecemeal, how people treat women or how to treat your family. . . . The danger is that you suddenly end up in the other camp, you know, that camp might be someone like Christopher Hitchens  .  .  . but also people like Ayaan Hirsi [Ali] and Maajid Nawaz.20  .  .  . I guess with people like me, we haven’t really come out21 per se, and because people like them have accepted completely the values of the West, we dislike that a bit.  .  .  . Because if very dislikeable people who speak out to a certain degree, and completely adopt a modernist set of values . . . to me it seems like someone who’s a communist, suddenly becomes hard-­ right fascist.22 Haroon alluded to the discussion on ‘apostasisers’; there were particular ideas within the Islamic community about so-­called ex-­Muslims. According to Haroon, these ideas were based on prominent people within the public debate on Islam in Western society, and he described them as ‘the other camp’ from Muslims. For Haroon, however, there were two reasons to be cautious to be identified as such: first, he did not want to be in ‘that camp’ since he still had a Muslim family and did not want to exclude future Muslim friends, and second, his opinions often differed from their narrative.23 Both Tariq and Haroon found a blurriness in certain expectations of what it means to be secular, especially when it comes to speaking out: piecemeal, certain behaviours that are supposed to accompany their convictions were negotiated. However, the performance of such convictions is not always possible nor desired, due to their own histories and learned dispositions. Similarly, Eymen commented on people from Islamic communities that have gone ‘over the top in being white’, or ‘Dutch’. He expressed his discomfort: You have Muslims that try to behave real Dutch, right? Like, ‘we don’t belong to you [Muslims]’, so sleazy! ‘We are so modern, picture with a glass of wine, I am so cool!’ You see it a lot with the social media heroes.

172  Maria Vliek Other issues Eymen had concerned sexual liberties. He explained he was now part of a polyamorous friend group, which intrigued him, but he still struggled to ‘embrace’: “I’m part of an anarchist group for whom polyamory is totally normal. I  really like the idea as well!  .  .  . But I  noticed that I  simply can’t do it. I  support it, but I  can’t do it!”24 This particular example shows two things. First, it highlights the struggles when it comes to ‘performing conviction’, and that those embodied convictions of morality that one was raised with are not easily or ever overcome. Many of my interlocutors indeed experienced such an ‘in-­between’ position, wanting or expecting to be able to behave in a certain way, but feeling that ‘something’ was holding them back. Second, Eymen’s comments are in the context of a particular Dutch construction of an embodiment of what is considered ‘the other’ to Muslims. Let me elaborate. Balkenhol, Mepschen, and Duyvendak (2016) argued that the Dutch nativist discourse is best understood through the three concepts of sexuality, race, and religion. By analysing the sexualised racist discourse surrounding the figure of ‘black Pete’,25 as well as the construction of the dichotomy of Islam and homosexuality, they argued that both black racism as well as Islamophobia are bound by the accusation of sexuality: whilst Dutch people of African descent are seen as hyper-­sexual, Muslim Dutch are deemed to not be sexual enough for the “Dutch culture of sexularism” (109). Both forms are then employed to define the nativist discourse and mark boundaries between self and others. I refer to Balkenhol et al.’s work here, to illustrate Eymen’s comments to be in reference to these particularly Dutch frames of othering and Dutch nativist discourse. Eymen found those ‘social media heroes’ wanting to perform the so-­called modern’ to be intentionally in opposition to Muslims. He further reckoned that he ought to be able to embrace sexual liberties now that he was no longer religious. Indeed, Balkenhol et al. found that the Dutch frames are constructed on modernity and non-­religiosity with certain sexual freedoms, whilst religion (i.e. Islam) is associated with sexual suppression.26 Others expressed similar issues with sexual liberties – though not to the extent of polyamory  – especially when it would concern premarital sex. Often, it took time before that step could be taken. Amina explained her struggle with the idea of not having premarital sex: That’s not going to happen [laughs]. But for a long time, I struggled with someone sitting on my shoulder, who says: ‘what are you doing?’ . . . because it’s what they teach you from a very young age, and then that is gone, and then you have to decide for yourself.27 Amina explained how she physically could not fully commit to having sex, due to ‘someone’ holding her back, asking her what she was doing – even when doing it. She also made a distinction between ‘what they teach you from a very young age’ and wanting to decide for herself, since that authority is no longer there.

Negotiating embodiment moving out of Islam 173 Other problematics that were mentioned in both the Netherlands and Britain, when it came to ‘performance of conviction’, included ‘making fun of religion’. Many of my interlocutors referred to ‘famous ex-­Muslims’ such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali as having formed a certain frame within Muslim circles for people who have moved out of Islam to be publicly critical of their former religion and communities. As Haroon confirmed, conforming to this frame was rarely desired. Another hurdle was the expectations of becoming accustomed to ‘alcohol culture’ now that one was no longer religious. Karim elaborated: “I still, instinctively, I won’t go to the bar and order a drink. Not because I think it’s wrong now, but because . . . I haven’t ever done that growing up”. Or eating pork: “the internal reflex is: ‘oh no, I can’t eat that!’ and then try and sort of argue with myself like: ‘no! why can’t you? I couldn’t eat that because I believed, I don’t believe that anymore’ ”.28 These examples have illustrated three things. First, a secular body, according to my interlocutors, meant being convinced of Western liberty and Islamic suppression, being sexually active, openly speaking about Islam and non-­belief, performing being secular by joining pub culture, or being a social media hero speaking out against Islam. Second, they often experienced problems when attempting to adopt such a supposedly non-­religious lifestyle, which would require the ‘reprogramming’ of their old beliefs and embodied dispositions. Such renegotiations were not always possible when practices were experienced as more permanent dispositions. Third, these attempts at negotiation revealed the effects of the stabilisation of distinct modes of power of a ‘secular body’ on the formation of self-­making. When confronted with both religious as well as secular dispositions and when convictions change and are expected  – by self and others  – to be performed, processes of (re)negotiating these dispositions may commence. As shown here, these may not always be successful or even desirable, but they are realities as evidence of the distinct modes of power governing our lives.

Conclusion I opened this chapter by reflecting on the performativity of our bodies, as singular, plural, and as markers of who belongs and who does not in social groups or even society. These demarcations have become particularly salient in contemporary Europe over what Amir-­Moazami has titled ‘religiously connoted transgressions’, or public debate on matters of what is deemed appropriately religious (i.e. Islamic) presence in secular societies. I  have explored what happens to bodies when individuals experience a loss of faith as well as how their self-­formation is influenced by these ‘distinct modes of power’ producing religious and secular bodies. I have tried to show how first, negotiations over what is deemed religious behaviour or transgressive behaviour coloured my interlocutors’ trajectories out of Islam, norms that differed per situation. ‘Leaving’ and what that entailed became particularly visible in what was considered non-­negotiable

174  Maria Vliek by self and others. These were negotiations over performative acts, or refusals to perform such acts, that made statements to the self as much as they do to others, as to how behaviour was renegotiated in light of new convictions. Second, I have described certain embodiments that were retained when moving out of Islam, either consciously or out of an incapacity to change learned religious dispositions. These particular expectations where discomfort and negotiation became evident gave the first clue on a secular body: it was emphatically seen as the absence of religious knowledges, practice, and behaviours. Furthermore, a non-­religious body, according to my interlocutors, meant being convinced of Western liberty vs. Islamic suppression, being sexually active, openly speaking about Islam and non-­belief, performing being secular by embracing pub culture, or being a ‘social media hero’ speaking out against Islam. My interlocutors’ stories revealed the effects of the stabilisation of distinct modes of power of a ‘secular body’ on the formation of self-­making. When confronted with both religious as well as secular embodiments and when convictions change and are expected to be performed by both self and others, processes of (re)negotiating these dispositions commenced. A secular body, or a religious one, is in its conception not an empirical reality but rather ‘a distinct mode of power’ capable of shaping self-­formation. In this sense, I do not contest previous scholarship on ‘a secular body’: all agree in my understanding that the secular and the religious are shaping, either by institutionalised forms of demarcation or by the societal practices, a so-­called secular body. However, by fleshing out the contemplations of those who move from religious to secular realms of knowledge, practice, and embodiment, the effects of such modes of power, to be clear, from both religious as well as secular perspectives, became visible. Maya said to me at some point: “There is this binary view of ‘you’re in or you’re out’, and that needs to change”. This chapter has shown that movements away from religion cannot be conceptualised as such, and this played out particularly on the body and behaviours. Such dispositions may become available for (re)negotiation, rather than these dispositions being subjugated to choices of being one or the other. Influenced by one’s body as learned, one had to renegotiate religious and secular bodies, when moving out of Islam.

Notes 1 Also see E. Marshall Brooks’ thoughtful and compelling Disenchanted lives. Apostasy and ex-­Mormonism among the Latter-­day Saints (Brooks 2018). 2 Similar to Amir-­Moazami’s approach to include the social manifestations of institutionalised secularity in the investigation of ‘the secular’, the idea of multiple secularities also incorporated both the state ideology and forms of differentiation between what is deemed religious and secular, as well as the cultural forms and meanings that underlie such an understanding (i.e: Wohlrab-­Sahr and Burchardt 2012).

Negotiating embodiment moving out of Islam 175 3 I have phrased it ‘this way around’ since my interlocutors are all born and/ or raised in either the Netherlands or Britain, both secular countries (i.e. secularism is the dominant ideology for state apparatus and dominant public discourse). 4 All names have been anonymised. 5 Quotes from personal interview. London, 24 January 2018. 6 Quotes from personal interview. London, 21 November 2017. 7 ‘Apostasy’ is a religious term for moving out of religion and is therefore not used as an analytical category in this chapter. 8 Significantly, this is translated from the Dutch expression ‘van God los’, which is usually translated in English as ‘out of control’. The literal translation would be Godless, or out of God’s control. 9 Quotes from personal interview. Utrecht, 15 August 2017. 10 Quotes from personal interview. Manchester, 31 January 2018. 11 Quotes from personal interview. Nijmegen, 20 February 2018. 12 Quotes from personal interview. Leeds, 1 February 2018. 13 Quotes from personal interview. Leeds, 1 February 2018. 14 Personal interview. Manchester, 31 January 2018. 15 Personal interview. Groningen, 5 April 2017. 16 Quotes from personal interview. Leeds, 1 February 2018. 17 I am aware of the academic and popular discussions currently taking place on ‘Islamophobia’, ‘racism’, and ‘racialisation’. For the purpose of this chapter, I draw on the distinctions made by Steve Garner and Saher Selod (2015) in their introduction to the special issue Islamophobia and the Racialization of Muslims, that ‘religion can be raced’. They argued that bodies are the ultimate site of racism, and through the various case studies presented in the special issue, they present “how people read Muslim-­ness onto individuals by using a combination of ideas about culture and appearance” (12), and thereby lay bare the complex relationships between race and religion. 18 Also see: Rhodes (2013) on the construction of whiteness in the ‘postracial’ UK. 19 Quotes from personal interview. Manchester, 31 January 2018. 20 Christopher Hitchens was an American author and broadcaster and a self-­ fashioned anti-­theist, having written many books with titles such as, among many others: God is not great. How religion poisons everything and The portable atheist. Essential readings for the non-­believer. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-­born former Dutch politician who utilised her narrative ‘out of Islam into Enlightenment’ to further her political agenda and often speak out against the ‘horrors of Islam’. Maajid Nawaz was a member of the Islamist group Hizb ut-­Tahrir, which he renounced in 2007, now actively calling for ‘secular Islam’. He is one of the harshest critics of Islamism in the UK today. These people are referenced here by Haroon to describe typical ‘loud’ former Muslims who now speak out against their former religion. 21 The vocabulary of ‘coming out’ is frequently used by people leaving Islam when discussing their disclosure of non-­belief to friends or family. For an elaboration on this phenomenon, see: Cottee (2018). 22 Quotes from personal interview. Leeds, 1 February 2018. 23 Also see: Vliek (2018) on a thorough investigation into ‘secularist ex-­Muslim voices’ in Britain. 24 Quotes from personal interview. Nijmegen, 20 February 2018. 25 ‘Black Pete’, or ‘zwarte Piet’, is a blackface character who is part of the Dutch annual ‘Sinterklaas’ festival, which has come under increasing (international) scrutiny and debate. The Dutch nativist discourse argues that the character is ‘not racist’, and part of ‘Dutch culture’, whilst anti-­racist discourse argues for black Pete’s abolition.

176  Maria Vliek 26 It is sadly beyond the scope of this chapter to extensively compare the Netherlands and Britain in their construction of ‘whiteness’, race, religion, and sexuality, as well as the nuances this brings to the influences of ‘a secular body’ on the formation of selfhood in times of religious transformation. Here, it suffices to note that these contexts do have different histories of secularity and the construction of ‘otherness’, but that there is also an overarching European or even Western discourse at play in which secularism is generally presented as incompatible with Islam. It is also from this dominant ‘distinct mode of power’ that secular and religious bodies take shape and are governed, which is considered relevant here. 27 Personal interview. Utrecht, 27 July 2017. 28 Personal interview. London, 21 November 2017.

References Amir-­Moazami, Schirin. 2013. “The Secular Embodiments of Face-­veil Controversies across Europe.” In Islam and Public Controversy in Europe, edited by Nilufer Gole, 83–101. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Amir-­Moazami, Schirin. 2016. “Investigating the secular body: The politics of the male circumcision debate in Germany.” ReOrient 1 (2): 147–170. Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Asad, Talal. 2011. “Thinking about the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics.” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 657–675. Balkenhol, Markus, Paul Mepschen, and Jan Willem Duyvendak. 2016. “The Nativist Triangle: Sexuality, Race and Religion in the Netherlands.” In The Culturalization of Citizenship, edited by J. W. Duyvendak et al., 97–112. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brooks, E. Marshall. 2018. Disenchanted Lives. Apostasy and Ex-­ Mormonism among the Latter-­day Saints. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Cottee, Simon. 2018. “In the Closet. The Concealment of Apostasy among Ex-­Muslims in Britain and Canada.” In Moving in and out of Islam, edited by Karin van Nieuwkerk, 281–305. Austin: University of Texas Press. Davidman, Lynn. 2015. Becoming Un-­ orthodox. Stories of Ex-­ Hasidic Jews. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fadil, Nadia. 2009. “Managing Affects and Sensibilities: The Case of Not-­ handshaking and Not-­fasting.” Social Anthropology 17 (4): 439–454. Fadil, Nadia. 2011. “Not-­/Unveiling as an Ethical Practice.” Feminist Review 98 (1): 83−109. Fadil, Nadia, and Mayanthi Fernando. 2015. “Rediscovering the ‘Everyday’ Muslim. Notes on an Anthropological Divide.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (2): 59–88. Garner, Steve and Saher Selod. 2015. “The Racialization of Muslims: Empirical Studies of Islamophobia.” Critical Sociology 41 (1): 9−19. Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Vintage Books. Hirschkind, Charles. 2011. “Is There a Secular Body?” Cultural Anthropology 26 (4): 633–647. Hocke, Monique. 2014. “Narratives of Piety. An Analysis of the Formation of Moral Selves among Young Muslim Women in Denmark.” Unpublished PhD diss., Roskilde University.

Negotiating embodiment moving out of Islam 177 Mahmood, Saba. 2004. Politics of Piety. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mahmood, Saba. 2013. “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” Critical Inquiry 35 (4): 836−862. Rhodes, James. 2013. “Remaking Whiteness in the ‘postracial’ UK.” In The State of Race, edited by N. Kapoor et al., 49–71. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Schielke, Samuli. 2010. “Second Thoughts about the Anthropology of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life.” Zentrum Moderner Orient. Working Paper. Turner, Bryan S. 1984. The Body and Society. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd. Van Nieuwkerk, Karin. 2018. Moving in and out of Islam. Austin: University of Texas Press. Vliek, Maria. 2018. “Challenging Secularities, Challenging Religion: ‘Secularist ex-­ Muslim voices’ in the British debate on Islam and freedom of expression.” Journal of Religion in Europe 11 (4): 348–377. Vliek, Maria. 2019. “ ‘It’s not just about faith”  – Narratives of Transformation When Moving out of Islam in the Netherlands and Britain.” Islam and Christian-­ Muslim Relations 30 (3): 323–344. Wohlrab-­ Sahr, Monika, and Marian Burchardt. 2012. “Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities.” Comparative Sociology 11 (6): 875–909.

9 Vacillating in and out of whiteness Non-­religiosity and racial (dis)identification among the Iranian-­Dutch Rahil Roodsaz Introduction SHAHRAM:  Although

Islam might have so many negative aspects, it sometimes protects people. For my mom, Islam was the most important thing when she lost my dad back in Iran and was left alone with three children, including me. To me, Islam is a motivation to be kind to other people. What is wrong with that? SINA:  It truly saddens me to hear this pro-­Islam story from a fellow countryman, especially here in the Netherlands. What women like your mother in Iran need is not religion, but an adequate, fair, and protective government. People should be educated or assisted in their evolvement towards ethical beings so that there is no need for God, angels, heaven, hell, etc. (Facebook conversation between two Iranian-­Dutch men in their thirties) MARYAM:  We’re

not there yet, but we’ve come a long way. I  am a much more liberal person now. I accept sex before marriage, homosexuality, and all that. We are not like Arabs or Muslims. Our culture is much better suited to adapt to the Western way of life because of our long history of civilisation. We’re nothing like Turks and Moroccans, even though we might be mistaken for one. (One-­on-­one interview with an Iranian-­Dutch woman, 38)

FARHAD:  I

wish I could feel completely free, but that is very difficult among Iranians. Not that they are like Arabs, Afghans, or those fundamentalist Muslims; some of them have even become atheists, and they really try to accept me, but still I don’t feel free and comfortable among the majority of Iranians. It’s not enough to drink, dance, and wear modern clothes. We need a more profound change in our community. (One-­on-­one interview with an Iranian-­Dutch self-­identified gay man, 34)

Vacillating in and out of whiteness 179 These quotes are extractions from data that I  gathered during a research project on self-­ fashioning through articulations of sexuality among the Iranian-­Dutch, an ethnographic study conducted in 2009–2014 and 2017. One of the important findings of this project, as the quotes convey, is the simultaneous prominence of a sceptical attitude towards religion in general and Islam in particular, and a strong sense of dissociation from specific religious and ethnic communities in the Netherlands, which are located in the ‘problematic zone’ in Dutch public discussions about ‘integration’ and multiculturalism. The first extract is from a longer discussion on Facebook, in which two men are talking about the (ir)relevance of religion/Islam in modern times. Shahram is pushed to defend the emotional and ethical added value of Islam, while Sina is disappointed in having to explain that education and modern institutions have or should take away religion’s role of ethical guidance. The references to ‘fellow countryman’ and ‘the Netherlands’ suggest an expectation to know better than to defend Islam as someone who presumably has fled from, or is at least familiar with, religious fundamentalism in the homeland and is now in a safe space and free to express his critical views. Although the conversation was mainly between these two young men, several others hastened to remind Shahram of all the misdeeds of the current Iranian regime committed in the name of Islam. The next quote is from a one-­on-­one conversation with a woman who has lived in the Netherlands for more than a decade and spoke favourably about a personal and collective transformation towards what she sees as progressive Western values of premarital sex and homosexuality. The reason she offers for this gradual, yet remarkable success is the openness of the Iranians towards improvement, unlike Arab, Muslim, Turkish, and Moroccan communities. The reference to these specific groups should be understood within the contemporary context of anxieties about the position of Arab and Muslim refugees and migrants in the Netherlands, against which a distinct sexually progressive Dutch nation becomes constructed (Bracke 2012; Dudink 2011, 2017’ Mepschen, Duyvendak, and Tonkens 2010; Van der Veer 2014; Van Nieuwkerk 2004). Compared to Arabs, Muslims, Turks, and Moroccans, according to Maryam, Iranians are the exceptional other with an impressive history of civilisation and the ability to transform into good citizens. The last quote points at the struggle of a man who does not feel entirely at home within the Iranian-­Dutch community, which he ascribes to a lack of true acceptance of his homosexuality. While, similar to Maryam, Farhad acknowledges the exceptional progressive change among the Iranian-­Dutch compared to certain other minority groups with an Islamic background, he simultaneously questions the depth and the authenticity of this change. As I argue elsewhere (Roodsaz 2015), homosexuality appears to be one of the most contested topics in the Iranian-­Dutch discussions about sexuality and the constructions of a modern self. While ‘true’ homosexuality is tolerated

180  Rahil Roodsaz by most of the interlocutors as a matter of human right, as a rhetorical manoeuvre, strict conditions are set to rule out inauthenticity in terms of fluid gender identities and unfixed sexual orientations. As a self-­identified gay man, Farhad points at what he experiences as the Iranian-­Dutch ambiguous positioning towards homosexuality. In this chapter, I  will further probe references to and intersections of religion and race in the Iranian-­Dutch articulations of belonging. The data used for this chapter was conducted in a research project about processes of sexual self-­fashioning among the Iranian-­Dutch (Roodsaz 2015). The topics of sexuality and gender are crucial for understanding Dutch secularism and the production of a racialised distinction between the civilised modern self and premodern religious other (Van Nieuwkerk 2004). While recognising the importance of this intersection, the analytical focus in this chapter are the topics of religion and race while issues of sexuality and gender figure prominently in the background. More specifically, this chapter is concerned with non-­religiosity as a set of multiple practices, attitudes, and processes which were framed and experienced by the interlocutors as alternative to religion and religiosity. These include mocking religion/Islam or expressing anti-­Islamic or anti-­religious sentiments; performing perceived non-­Islamic acts such as drinking and dancing; envisioning and expecting a gradual and sometimes difficult process of freeing oneself from previous repressive cultural norms and values of sexuality and gender informed by Islam; and developing new understandings and sensibilities on issues of sexuality and gender outside a religious/ Islamic frame. Non-­religiosity as conceptualised here might thus entail both inner convictions and outer presentations. My concern in this chapter is not whether these practices, attitudes, and processes are inherently non-­ religious. Rather, I am interested in how some aspects of the interlocutors’ lives become meaningful and are shaped in assumed contradiction from religion. According to Lois Lee (2015), ‘non-­religion’ is a specific mode of secularity and one of the many possible positions in relation to religion. Non-­ religion, Lee elaborates, entails both negative and positive experiences of difference from religion: “what it means to live in difference to religion” (2015, 13). As “a quality that is real and existing in the world” (2015, 33), Lee postulates, non-­religion focuses on difference rather than mere rejection or indifference. While rejection in the forms of dismissal, ridicule, or casting off of religion and religiosity is included in this conceptualisation of non-­religion, the goal is to trace the ways in which people invest in a position in relation to, yet distinct from, religion. What furthermore makes Lee’s approach to ‘non-­religion’ particularly useful for this chapter is its characterisation as “an empirical phenomenon” instead of an attempt to understand “its fundamental nature” (2015, 35). This allows for empirical cases of non-­religiosity to be messy and to contain multiple, possibly contradictory components.

Vacillating in and out of whiteness 181 Simultaneously, I am interested in how this non-­religiosity is related to the far more implicit, scattered, and ambiguous Iranian-­Dutch concerns with race. To understand this relationship, various, sometimes contradictory discursive and embodied practices of racialisation as observed during fieldwork will be discussed, such as an explicit dissociation from certain ethnic and religious communities, notably Arabs, Afghans, Moroccans, and Turks; resisting Arabic influence on Farsi; hair bleaching as a practice of beautification among women; refusing to speak Farsi or the denial of the Iranian background altogether; and feeling amused when misrecognised as native Dutch, Italian, or Portuguese and frustrated when mistaken for an Arab or a Moroccan. Rather than being concerned with whether these discursive and embodied practices are inherently or self-­evidently matters of ‘race’, my goal is to trace identifications with racial categories in Iranian-­ Dutch articulations of belonging and difference, and to simultaneously analyse how through these articulations the interlocutors imagine and construct an ambiguous relationship to whiteness as a space to move in and out of in the specific Dutch context. As a way of turning the gaze of critical race studies from the ‘other’ to the norm, in the past two decades, whiteness has been scrutinised within the interdisciplinary field of whiteness studies (e.g. Dyer 1988; Frankenberg 1993; Griffin and Braidotti 2002; Morrison 1992; Wekker 2016). This scholarship has analysed the (re)productions of whiteness as a social construct beyond overt rhetorics and at the level of everyday life in order to counter its normativity and invisibility. With the goal to denaturalise the ‘natural’, it has asked questions about whiteness as an organising social principle with real political implications, while illustrating its highly contextual, often ambiguous configurations and intersections with other categories of difference such as sexuality, gender, class, and religion. Whiteness as understood in this chapter pertains to a specific part of this scholarship which engages with the ambiguity, conditionality, and porousness, rather than normativity and invisibility of this social construct. Expressions and performances of non-­religiosity and racial (dis)identification among the Iranian-­Dutch need to be understood against the background of political and popular Dutch and global discussions and anxieties about religious and racial boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Moreover, a broader transnational anti-­Islam discourse has been noted among Iranian-­descended intellectuals and public figures in several diasporic post-­9/11 contexts (Roodsaz and Jansen 2018). As pointed out by Minoo Moallem (2005), Iranians living outside Iran tend to align with contemporary Islamophobic tendencies in Western societies. Furthermore, associations of Dutchness with whiteness as deeply embedded in the Dutch cultural archive (Wekker 2016) form another important context against which Iranian-­ Dutch discursive and embodied practices of non-­ religiosity and racial (dis)identification are shaped. Discourses of sexuality and racial and religious belonging thus co-­constitute one another and intersect at the national, global, and everyday community level.

182  Rahil Roodsaz By focusing on the religion-­race nexus, furthermore, this chapter contributes to a growing scholarly field on contemporary racialisations of Islam in North American and Western European contexts (e.g. Selod and Simmon 2013; Van Nieuwkerk 2004; Galonnier 2013; Selod and Simmon 2015; Modood 1997; Meer and Modood 2018). In this field, the experiences of Muslim communities and white converts to Islam with Islamophobia are studied through the conceptual lens of racialisation (Barot and Bird 2001), providing an account of the everyday lives of Muslims and the constructions of whiteness and non-­whiteness in respective societies. The focus on national contexts, moreover, allows us to investigate and compare the specific mechanisms through which racial categories are made and unmade. However, while this literature focuses on the experiences of self-­identified Muslims, this chapter wants to contribute to the analyses of whiteness as a social construct from the perspective of the Iranian-­Dutch interlocutors who dissociate themselves from Islam and religiosity, through which, I will argue, they vacillate in and out of whiteness. The concepts of non-­religiosity and racial (dis)identification will shed light on both the power and the fragility of whiteness. Rather than seeking closure through definitions, however, these concepts will be employed as a framework to explore the Iranian-­Dutch experiences with issues of religion and race as an indicative part of their diasporic transformations. Finally, I hope to contribute to studies of the Iranian diaspora in which non-­religion and racial (dis)identification have rarely been traced and analysed, much less their intersections. In order to argue for an analytical focus on religion, race, and their nexus and to situate the present research, I now briefly review relevant scholarship on sexuality and gender in the Iranian diaspora and the limited, though insightful discussions of religion and race.

Religion and race in Iranian diaspora studies The limited attention to religion and race as analytical categories in scholarship on sexuality and gender in the Iranian diaspora is remarkable. While references to an anti-­religious positioning or concerns with one’s ethnic and racial belonging are haphazardly mentioned in various studies in this field (Ahmadi 2003a, 2003b; Darvishpour 1999; Merghati Khoei, Whelan, and Cohen 2008; Shahidian 1999; Farahani 2007), the articulations of the research participants are seldom seen or qualified as matters of race, nor is the attitude of the research participants towards religion and religiosity taken seriously as a topic deserving of an in-­depth investigation in its own right. The tendency, rather, is to understand everyday stories of the Iranian migrants and refugees about sexuality and gender as issues of cultural difference. However, an emerging body of literature has, to different extents, taken up the concepts of religion (Amin 2017; Gholami 2016, 2014; McAuliffe 2007) and race (Dabashi 2011; Farahani 2012; Maghbouleh 2017) as an

Vacillating in and out of whiteness 183 analytical focus when probing the Iranian diasporic articulations of sexuality, gender, and/or belonging. Using the concept of ‘regimes of (im)mobility’, for instance, Amin (2017) investigates the dynamic intersection between ethnicity, religion, and gender in the case of the 2006 trial of an Iranian-­American man convicted of killing his four-­year-­old daughter during a custody dispute with his ex-­wife. Amin’s analyses reveal how, depending on the immediate circumstances, one can move and navigate between non-­static social identities, such as ‘the Iranian Muslim’ and ‘the American Christian’, holding ambiguous and sometimes contradictory views of sexuality and gender without experiences of confliction. As a framework, the regimes of (im)mobility allows us to trace religion as a moving part in negotiations of belongings and as closely linked to other social identities, such as ethnicity and gender. While Amin is interested in religion in terms of its mechanisms of (im) mobility, McAuliffe (2007) takes the different religious backgrounds of the second-­generation Iranian migrants living in London, Sydney, and Vancouver as a resource in diaspora to imagine and express a desire for ‘return’ to the homeland. As the ‘Persian Muslim’ majority of the Iranians in diaspora oppose orthodox Islam, disavow religious rituals, and ‘do’ religion only through habit and adhere to a more secular worldview, McAuliffe proposes to conceptualise the Islamic identity of this group as ‘cultural’ rather than ‘religious’. To them, McAuliffe elaborates, Islam’s significance lies in its role as part of their Iranian national identity. In contrast, the Baha’is, a religious minority group both in homeland and in diaspora, are much more reluctant to embrace the national Iranian identity and refrain from investing in the creation and maintenance of a sense of connection with Iran. Due to experiences of religious oppression in their homeland, the Baha’is are less inclined to claim Iranian nationality in diaspora. The analytical focus on religious affiliation enables McAuliffe to decentre the nation by illustrating its dominant role and exclusionary practices inside and outside the homeland. What Amin and McAuliffe have in common, in their approach to the concept of religion, is their interest in its (strategic) utilisation; (non-­)religiosity forms a vehicle for the interlocutors to imagine (non-­)belonging. Building upon this approach, Gholami (2014) probes the prevalence of “jettisoning all things Islamic” in various Western Iranian diasporic communities. More than just trying to understand what this form of non-­religiosity stands for, Gholami is interested in its everyday life mechanisms by analysing processes of self-­stylising and attempts at achieving freedom. Non-­religiosity then becomes a deliberate choice to live without Islam, informing various daily practices and interactions, including consuming alcohol, deviating from Islamic traditions, and changing Islamic or Arabic surnames into Persian or Western alternatives. Consequently, the much smaller group of devout Muslim Iranians feel stigmatised by their community (Gholami 2016). These specific anti-­Islamic sentiments lead Gholami to propose the concept of ‘non-­Islamiosity’, which refers to individual and social consciousness

184  Rahil Roodsaz and spaces free from Islam in which “certain desires and sensibilities can take root, flourish and give rise to alternative identities and experiences” (Gholami 2014, 8). Religion, in the form of its Islamic negation, is at once studied as a strategy, discourse, desire, sensibility, consciousness, and a process. Although ‘non-­Islamiosity’ seems highly useful as an analytical framework in the case of the Iranian-­Dutch, I choose the broader concept of non-­religiosity given the more modest and prominently explorative goal of this chapter. An even more limited part of the scholarship on Iranians in diaspora discusses race as an important concept to understand negotiations of belonging. There are, however, a few exceptions. Focusing entirely on the concept of racialisation, in ‘Brown Skin, White Masks’,1 Dabashi (2011, 20) investigates the role of immigrant ‘comprador intellectuals’ as native informers who have immersed themselves in ‘the white-­identified culture’ and serve the interests of the empire by confirming racist and Islamophobic assumptions about their homelands. While noting an anti-­Islamic and anti-­Arab sentiments among Iranians in diaspora more generally, Dabashi focuses on intellectuals as a particularly vocal and influential group. Amongst others, Dabashi discusses the book Reading Lolita in Tehran by the Iranian-­American author Azar Nafisi as a text that “abuse[s] legitimate causes (in this case women’s repression) for illegitimate purposes (US global domination)” (Dabashi 2011, 70). The bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir about a female professor of literature who circumvents the Islamic regime’s limitations on life by secretly discussing controversial Western masterpieces such as Nabokov’s Lolita with seven of her brightest students. According to Dabashi, such texts are instrumental in manufacturing consent for the ‘war on terror’. Here, whiteness functions as an imaginary category of identification that can be appropriated as a mask to deal with a sense of racial inferiority and to enable careerism. The desire to imagine oneself as culturally ‘white’ in Iranian diasporic contexts is also discussed in another study by Farahani (2012, 2013) about negotiations of masculinity among Iranian immigrant men in Stockholm, Sydney, and London. Farahani illustrates how emphasising and celebrating the freedom achieved in new societies serve as a ground to imagine inclusion in a new (white) value system and a desirable masculinity despite considerable loss of social and economic capital caused by displacement and actual experiences of racism and marginalisation. The latter experiences are in fact downplayed by the research participants, arguing that such incidents are inevitable in the context of migration and mostly happen to Arab, African, and Turkish people who fail to integrate unlike to the imagined civilised, middle-­ class, and highly educated Iranians. An intersectional approach focusing on race, gender, and class is used to analyse these Iranian immigrant men’s attempts to pass as white. The role of religion or religiosity in racial passing, however, remains untouched.

Vacillating in and out of whiteness 185 In a comprehensive study on race, Maghbouleh (2017) provides a multi-­ layered account of the Iranian-­American experiences of belonging as a group that is legally considered white and invisible, and yet is informally perceived as non-­ white and hyper-­ visible. Maghbouleh investigates the mismatch between the Iranian-­American legal and sometimes internal ‘whitewashing’ on the one hand and everyday experiences of racism and exclusion in the post-­9/11 US on the other. Especially the first-­generation Iranian-­American migrants’ socialisation into an “Aryan and anti-­ Arab national history, ‘Caucasian’ geographic location, and concomitant white racial identity as children in Iran” appears to contradict the second-­generation complaints about race-­based discrimination in what they perceive as hegemonic white American spaces (Maghbouleh 2017, 17). Whiteness is studied as a category of identification, which is occasionally granted or revoked, a mechanism which, as Maghbouleh postulates, becomes particularly tangible in the case of a racially liminal group such as the Iranian-­Americans. This chapter aims to contribute to this field of research by presenting an Iranian-­Dutch account and investigating the intersection between religion and race in the interlocutors’ negotiations with belonging. I am interested in the (simultaneous) functioning of non-­religiosity and racial (dis)identification as claim-­making and meaning-­making devices in a diasporic setting where the politics of belonging and re-­evaluations of the past and the present intensify (Hall 1990; Moore 2012). Given that both a sceptical attitude towards religion and concerns with (non-­)whiteness are at the centre of the Iranian diasporic negotiations with issues of belonging in various Western contexts, probing ‘religion’ and ‘race’ will provide insights into the diasporic experiences of the Iranian-­Dutch and a more comprehensive understanding of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion in the specific Dutch context. To lay bare the points of friction and the shifting white/non-­white status of the Iranian-­Dutch, and thereby the limits of whiteness in the Netherlands, in the following three empirical sections I will discuss (1) practices, attitudes, and processes of non-­religiosity, (2) discursive and embodied practices of racial (dis)identification, and (3) negotiations of belonging through a religion-­race nexus among the interlocutors. First, however, I will briefly reflect on the methodological approach.

Methodological approach This chapter is based on a larger ethnographic study on notions of sexuality and identity among the Iranian-­Dutch, conducted between 2009 and 2014, and additional interviews with four key interlocutors in 2017. Focusing on the topics of premarital sex, homosexuality, and non-­material cohabitation as three contested issues of public Dutch discussions of multiculturalism, I  used a variety of qualitative research methods, including in-­depth interviews (30), focus group discussions (five with another 22 participants), participant observation (numerous occasions, eight selected for

186  Rahil Roodsaz analysis), and online text analysis (more than 100 discussions, 65 selected for analysis) to investigate processes of self-­fashioning through sexuality among the interlocutors. All of the interlocutors were born in Iran and had entered the Netherlands as political refugees or migrants, 5 to 25  years prior to our conversations. The group of participants consisted of men and women from different age categories (the youngest was 25 and the oldest 54), residing in small, medium-­size, and cosmopolitan Dutch cities, with different backgrounds in terms of education, political affiliation, and occupation. This chapter is concerned with those interlocutors who identified as non-­religious or atheists, a position taken by the majority of all research participants.2 While issues of belonging were one of the main analytical concerns of the research, the concepts of religion and race were initially not included in the project design. Their relevance became clear during research, an account of which will be given in the next sections. The lack of initial analytical focus on religion and race has various implications. On the one hand, it means that data collection was not oriented towards probing these concepts, which inevitably limits the possibilities for a more nuanced and layered understanding of experiences of non-­ religiosity and racial (dis)identification among the research participants. On the other hand, both concepts have naturally appeared as important without being explicitly hinted at by the researcher, which attests to their relevance in the interlocutors’ lives. Due to these implications, the goal of this chapter is not to provide new theoretical insights, but rather to explore the role of religion and race in the Iranian-­ Dutch narratives of belonging.

Practices, attitudes, and processes of non-­religiosity As I found out during my fieldwork, Facebook was one of the main sites where anti-­religious sentiments were explicitly vented among the Iranian-­ Dutch, especially in the aftermath of 9/11. Either through sharing and liking anti-­Islam cartoons or spreading news on terrorist attacks by Muslims including pictures and videos, discussions were regularly initiated to condemn Islamic radicalism or Islam and religiosity altogether. A  shocking example was a poor-­quality video of what appeared to be the stoning of a young woman in a rural area somewhere in the Middle East, which was shared by a highly educated young Iranian-­Dutch woman with more than 1000 followers. The only explanation was “Islamic barbarism at its best”, which was confirmed by several expressions of disgust and horror by others underneath the post. While anti-­Islamic and anti-­religious sentiments shared through Facebook were sometimes rather harsh and explicit in character, I also encountered less aggressive and milder forms of non-­religiosity at other sites. For instance, during various social and cultural gatherings which I  attended for participant observation, certain Islamic customs were ridiculed, such

Vacillating in and out of whiteness 187 as fasting, praying, and eating halal food. One such joke was, “Mahmood, why don’t you eat this?! You know, they have used a halal method to butcher this pork.” As also observed by Gholami (2014, 2016) in other Iranian diasporic contexts, alcohol consumption at social gatherings and parties was often perceived as self-­evident, and those who refused to drink had to justify themselves. “Are you fasting?”, a middle-­aged man sarcastically asked a younger guy who refused a glass of whiskey during a birthday party. This party was held on the day of Ashura, when Shia Muslims commemorate the death of the grandson of the prophet Mohammad on the tenth day of the mourning month of Moharram. The same evening, when people were invited to the dance floor, jokes were made about how those who danced on Ashura could count on extra savaab (spiritual merit or reward). While, in my observations, Islamic events such as Ashura are neglected among most of the Iranian-­Dutch, other occasions, particularly Nowruz (Iranian New Year’s day), Yalda (longest night of the year), and Charshanbe Suri (fire festival) are still celebrated as important collective, spiritual, non-­Islamic festivities. Although these traditions are linked to pre-­Islamic notions of the supernatural and particularly to the Zoroastrian cosmology,3 specific references to their religious connotation were absent. Instead, a sense of temporary togetherness and nostalgia in a diasporic context was expressed. In the summer of 2013, I was conducting fieldwork on a road trip with a group of Iranian-­Dutch from different ages and socio-­economic backgrounds, and people would sing and listen to loud Iranian music and stop the car from time to time to dance and drink and have fun. When we discussed these experiences later, some of them mentioned that it felt like being “in a bubble for a short while, just like Charshanbe Suri or Eide Nowruz”. Despite the spiritual value and transcendental character of the religiously rooted activities described here, my interlocutors defined their experiences in terms of ‘shadi’ (happiness), ‘ba ham boodan’ (togetherness), and ‘hesse raha’i’ (feeling free). Avoiding direct references to religion or religiosity is perhaps not surprising given the previous Marxist political affiliation and its implied anti-­religious attitude among some of the Iranian-­Dutch. Such non-­Islamic yet religiously loaded engagements seem to provide a sphere within which a sense of togetherness and transcendence can be experienced while, ambiguously, maintaining the ideal of ‘non-­ religiosity’. An urge for freedom and feeling happy as opposed to being trapped in religious norms and ideas was explicitly mentioned by Mahboobeh, a woman in her late fifties. Mahboobeh, who now owns a hair salon, had left Iran 20 years ago, together with her ex-­husband and their daughter and son. I was introduced to her through another interlocutor who encouraged me to talk to Mahboobeh, because of her impressive character and courage to end a marriage after 30  years. About a year before our conversation, Mahboobeh had indeed decided to divorce her husband, which was

188  Rahil Roodsaz a difficult emotional process that was still ongoing. Explaining what this process entailed, she said: I’m trying to convince myself of my right to be happy as a woman, which is the opposite of what women who grew up in religious societies are taught. All religions expect the same from a married woman. Reflecting on her relationship, she said she never felt understood or respected by her husband: “I just carried on because I thought I was supposed to do that as a woman and for the sake of our children.” She now had decided to free herself from suffocating gender expectations which she connected to a religious upbringing. Her goal was to develop a new mode of being to be able to celebrate her newly gained freedom and opportunities for self-­rediscovery: I think I will need a few years before I can really be happy and enjoy my new life. I look forward to finding out more about myself and what I  like or dislike. It’s not easy, though. You have to work hard for it. And, you know, it’s about time, considering my age and after 20 years of living in this liberal country with so many opportunities for women. In Mahboobeh’s articulations, non-­religiosity, understood as taking distance from a religious mindset, functions as a framework to make sense of a decision to end a marriage and the emotionally difficult process of separation. Simultaneously, it informs the felt necessity for an alternative liberal attitude and the sensibility to be open and able to work towards a more fulfilling life. In the particular Iranian-­ Dutch cases discussed in this section, non-­ religiosity appears as dissociating oneself from Islam, or religion altogether; engaging in non-­Islamic embodied acts of drinking, dancing, and eating non-­halal food; articulating anti-­Islam or anti-­religious stances such as jokes about Islamic traditions and contributions to discussions of Islamophobia; imagining a gradual and difficult process of freeing oneself from a repressive religious mindset; and embracing a new freedom-­oriented sensibility about issues of gender, sexuality, and belonging. Non-­religiosity thus consists of a set of different practices, attitudes, and processes, allowing the research participants to claim space outside religion in the context of diaspora. It entails both inner convictions and outer presentations, and it includes explicit rejection of religion as well as embracing a position (on issues of sexuality and gender) that is perceived as distanced and freed from Islam/religion.

Discursive and embodied practices of racial (dis)identification References to race are common in Iranian-­Dutch articulations of beauty, particularly, but not exclusively, in relation to women. Phrases such as, “she is such a beauty with a very fair skin, blond hair, and green eyes,

Vacillating in and out of whiteness 189 you wouldn’t say she is Iranian” are often heard. Simultaneously, sabzeh women (those with a brown skin colour) are qualified as bamazzeh (adorable), pointing at a hierarchy between phenotypical characteristics associated with racial difference. The popularity of hair bleaching among some Iranian-­Dutch women is one such example. One of the interlocutors was called ‘a real woman’ by her brother after dyeing her hair blonde: “I don’t think I will ever be a brunette anymore”, she said. However, not everyone was considered physically suited. Another research participant, Sulmaz, a highly educated woman in her thirties with bleached hair, says: I wasn’t sure it would look good on me, but when people assumed I was Dutch, I knew I could get away with it. Further explaining her initial hesitation, she added: You have to have the total look for it. If your skin colour is not light enough or if you are too short, bleached hair would look horrible on you. While blonde hair and a light skin colour were preferred, and efforts were made by some of the Iranian-­Dutch women to create such a look, there is a fine line between believable and less believable outcomes, which is measured by the extent to which one becomes racially invisible (tall and blond) or manages to ‘pass’ in the Dutch context. Conversely, this example attests to the importance of skin and hair colour in the Dutch grammar of whiteness, instead of, for instance, socio-­economic positioning, level of education, active participation in society, or lifestyle. Such notions of beauty, however, are not shared by all Iranian-­Dutch. In particular, some of the younger research participants resisted this beauty model, as it appeared from my conversation with Elham, a woman in her mid-­twenties who was four years old at the time her family had left Iran. She reflected on her early teenage years, saying: My mother wanted me to put on foundation [makeup] that is lighter than my own skin colour, and she would worry about my skin getting darker during the summer. Years later, when Elham said she felt more self-­secured, she started embracing her looks as ‘typically Iranian’: “I  came to appreciate my dark hair, sabzeh [brown] skin, and almost unibrow [laughing].” Elham explained how self-­conscious she had become as a young girl by going to Iranian parties and festivities, because of what she thought was an obsession among women about how one should look: It’s not just that Iranian girls with a lighter skin colour received most of the compliments; you were expected not to accept your looks and to make yourself beautiful according to their standards.

190  Rahil Roodsaz It was only after she had left home for college that she said she had succeeded in ‘freeing’ herself from those expectations. Although I  encountered much less discussions on beauty among the Iranian-­Dutch men, sometimes jokes were made about unwanted body hair and waxing. Reza, a man in his early forties, whom I met at a cultural event in one of the bigger Dutch cities of Utrecht, pointed at his arm hair and sarcastically said: “I could be naked and no one would notice [laughter in the group].” Another man started giving him advice about some hair removal options and added: “but even then, there is no guarantee that people will stop thinking you’re Moroccan, speaking from own experience.” The possibility of being mistaken for a Moroccan was immediately recognised by another man who had been stopped by the police while driving an expensive car. He jokingly said: “I  was about to tell them: ‘Guys, I’m Persian! My DNA dictates that I drive an expensive car’ [laughter in the group].” A young woman continued the conversation in slight disbelief: I have been mistaken for an Italian many times, and once for a Portuguese, and of course, I let them believe that for a while [smile], but no one has ever though I was Moroccan. Reza replied: ‘Of course, look at you’, while pointing at her short dress. Although being mistaken for an Italian or a Portuguese citizen was experienced as amusing, complete denial of the Iranian background was simultaneously frowned upon. As one of the interlocutors, a middle-­aged woman, was complaining: “Other minority groups have each other’s back, but we hear someone speaking Farsi and we run as fast as we can.” The efforts to include oneself into the white secular Dutch category could sometimes go too far for some of the research participants. During fieldwork it happened only once that a man refused to participate in my research because he considered himself exclusively Dutch. Although I emphasised my interest in his story because of and not despite this self-­positioning, I was unable to persuade him. Besides this exceptional case, acknowledging the Iranian or Persian background was seen as compatible with constructions of a white, secular, and modern self. Causing confusion by appearing as Dutch, Italian, or Portuguese were in fact perceived as signs of a successful self-­refashioning in a diasporic context. Notably, serious discussions about experiences which could be perceived as discriminatory and racist, such as being stopped by a police officer because of driving in an expensive car as a brown man, rarely came up during my fieldwork. In one case, talking with a man in his mid-­fifties who was a shop owner in a small Dutch city and had been living in Holland for almost 30  years, he said he still did not feel at home in the Netherlands. Although he had some very close friends, all of them were of Iranian origin. I asked him why he thought this was the case, to which he replied: This is a tough question. On the one hand, these people are much more civilised than we are. On the other hand, I’m hundred percent sure

Vacillating in and out of whiteness 191 that my neighbours don’t trust me because of my background and how I look, as if I’m stealing something from them by just being here. He then justified this negative image by saying: I don’t blame them. They see all these khareji-­ha [foreigners] who benefit from the Dutch welfare system without doing anything in return. Some of them even accuse Dutch people of racism. When I asked him about his views on racism in the Netherlands, he replied slightly annoyed: Nonsense, there is no racism. Of course, there are some small incidents. I was once asked whether I knew what an elevator was before I came to the Netherlands, can you believe that? But I guess that is just part of migration. You have to accept the fact that people don’t know who you are and where you come from. They have all these misconceptions. You have to prove them wrong. Here, ‘misconceptions’ are justified as inevitable in the context of migration, while the burden of correcting those misconceptions is put on the migrant’s shoulder, which corresponds with the previously discussed findings in another study on Iranian immigrant men in Stockholm, Sydney, and London (Farahani 2012, 2013). Understandably, experiences of discrimination based on race and gender are difficult to reconcile with ideas about a modern and secular diasporic self. To identify racism would mean admitting to at least a partial failure of this process of self-­fashioning. The pursuit of a desirable change among the Iranian-­Dutch is in my observation an integral part of their attempts to validate their very position as refugees/migrants and the hardship of displacement that comes with it. Such issues of ethnic and racial belonging sometimes explicitly intersected with notions and practices of non-­religiosity in the Iranian-­Dutch community, a topic to which I now attend.

Negotiating belonging through a religion-­race nexus The economic and socio-­cultural position of (Muslim) immigrants in the Netherlands was one of the recurrent political discussions among the Iranian-­Dutch, as I  found out during my fieldwork. Although most of the interlocutors did not seriously consider voting for far-­right Dutch political parties, some of them supported and repeated certain critiques on Muslim communities articulated by right-­ wing politicians. During a Yalda celebration in the Dutch town of Nijmegen in 2014, a man in his mid-­fifties who had initiated a discussion about the political success of the far-­right in the Netherlands thought this development was ‘completely understandable’. He elaborated, Of course, people have had enough of all these khareji-­ha (foreigners). They have lost their patience.

192  Rahil Roodsaz And who can blame them?” Without hesitation, several others nodded in agreement while nobody considered the position of the Iranian-­Dutch themselves as part of khareji-­ha. Through the rhetorical act of showing understanding for the popular anti-­Islamic and anti-­migration political parties, these interlocutors included themselves in the white and secular category of ‘people’ as opposed to the non-­white and religious category of ‘foreigners’. The news about a young Iranian-­German man who had shot and killed nine people in a shopping mall in the city of Munich in 2016 shocked many in the Iranian-­Dutch community. While his acts were condemned unquestionably, there was also confusion about his motives, which initially were assumed to be related to Islamic terrorism. How could someone from Iranian descent living in Germany kill people in the name of Islam?, people wondered. Soon after, however, new information was released which pointed at the Nazi sympathies of the shooter, who had been inspired by the far-­right Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik and considered himself Aryan4 and thus German. His main target, we later came to know, had been people of Turkish and Arab origin. The initial framing of this incident and the confused reactions from the Iranian-­Dutch are telling about the discrepancy between how the Iranians’ religious and racial belonging are perceived by themselves and by the mainstream Dutch and international public media. Another notable finding connected to issues of religion and race as part of my fieldwork among the Iranian-­Dutch was the tendency among a small though growing number of people to seek and use Persian alternatives for Arabic vocabulary used in Farsi. Most notably, customary Arabic words such as salaam (hallo), tashakkor (thanks), and moteassefane (unfortunately) were avoided, and instead Persian equivalents of dorood, sepaas and, somewhat alien shoorbakhtane were used by people from different ages, but mostly by highly educated individuals. The motivations varied from “Persian is more beautiful, we should cherish it” to “We are not Arabs nor Muslims, why should we use Arabic words?” Even though these efforts were not widespread, they were highly praised even by those who continued using the Arab words out of habit. The eradication of Arabic influences from Persian language and culture goes back to the national modernisation projects carried out at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. As an attempt to transform Iran from a traditional society to a modern state during the Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911), the secular section of the Iranian elite initiated a process of ‘nationalisation’ while glorifying the pre-­Islamic Iranian history and identifying Islam as the cause of cultural degeneracy (Roodsaz 2015). The new Iranian identity imagined by this group of elite was based on ‘Persian civilisation’, seen as open to ‘Western modernity’ and positioned against ‘backward Islam and Arabs’ (Tavakoli-­Targhi 2001, 96). Although it goes beyond the scope of this chapter to properly historicise the entanglement

Vacillating in and out of whiteness 193 between modernisation and anti-­Arab and anti-­Islam sentiments, the current tendency among the Iranian-­Dutch to dissociate themselves from Arabs and Muslims as the means to imagine and construct a secular and modern self should be seen as part of a particular historical baggage. The Iranian-­ Dutch efforts to use religion and race as a frame to redefine and rebuild a self are thus related to both contemporary Dutch and historically rooted Iranian notions of the modern and secular ‘us’ versus the Muslim and Arab backward ‘other’.

A counter-­narrative The case of Elham, the young woman who resists imposed racially loaded norms of beauty in the Iranian-­Dutch community, does not stand alone. Towards the end of my fieldwork in 2014 and later in 2017, I noticed that among some of the younger Iranian-­Dutch interlocutors, they expressed support towards and sometimes participated in anti-­ racist and anti-­ Islamophobic movements in the Netherlands and beyond. Neda, a woman in her early thirties, for instance, had started a book club on themes of race, religion, and gender for an international group of ‘bicultural’ friends, with the aim to enhance their understandings of how these axes of difference operate and to share personal experiences of discrimination. Neda called her previous attitude about her position as a child of an Iranian migrant ‘naive’ and was now determined to investigate the ways her life had been and continued to be affected by this background: The Dutch like to think of themselves as tolerant people, and I used to buy into that. You only have to open your eyes and listen to other people’s experiences to know that diversity is accepted only superficially: so-­called ethnic food and festivities are nice. But actual diversity is still a problem in this country. Another interlocutor, Mohsen, a man in his thirties and highly educated like Elham and Neda, shared the view that embracing one’s contested position as a migrant in the Netherlands would be more realistic, as opposed to what he saw as the Iranian-­Dutch optimism about their inclusion. He elaborated, sounding astonished: My mother just ignores how people talk to her: like a child or someone with hearing problems. She is a dentist and she has been living in this country since I was six years old! Yet she is still treated as an illiterate person because of a little bit of accent. Or even worse, people compliment her for her courage not to wear hijab. To acknowledge such a demeaning and prejudiced attitude in the Netherlands and to address the internalisation of racism and Islamophobia among

194  Rahil Roodsaz the Iranian-­Dutch themselves, Mohsen said he would use every opportunity to discuss these topics in all kinds of gatherings: I tend to ruin the fun every time I get the chance by mentioning these heavy topics. I don’t like doing that, but I see it as a fight against racism. . . . In the past, I would be amazed by some of my Muslim friends who talked like this, but now I see solidarity with minority groups as my moral duty. Other examples of such resistance are protests organised by a group of younger Iranian-­Dutch against a ban in 2007 on receiving university education in the fields related to ‘proliferation sensitive nuclear technology’ for Iranians or, more recently, the KLM’s refusal to board Iranians travelling (back) to the US as a result of President Trump’s immigration ban in 2017. Both incidents followed political anxieties around a nuclear Islamic Iran and were identified as discriminatory against Iranian people by the protesters. Such articulations of ‘awakening’, sensitivities, and sensibilities related to discrimination based on religion, race, and gender have been noted as an upcoming phenomenon in different Iranian diasporic contexts (Maghbouleh 2017, 52). In the specific Dutch context, the publication of the book White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Wekker 2016) and the nationwide discussions it provoked, the intensified anti-­and pro-­Black Pete activism in the past few years, and the emergence of two political parties focusing mainly around issues of diversity, namely Denk and Bij1, have opened up a renewed debate and a sense of urgency about mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion based on religion, race, and gender, amongst others. It would be reasonable to assume that at least part of the Iranian-­Dutch community feels invited by such developments and discussions to re-­evaluate their position on issues of diversity and belonging and to rethink their own experiences as immigrants.

Conclusion Practices, attitudes, and processes of non-­ religiosity and discursive and embodied practices of racial (dis)identification appear crucial in the Iranian-­ Dutch articulations of belonging. Through mocking or rejecting religion/ Islam; engaging in non-­Islamic acts of drinking, dancing, and eating non-­ halal food; dissociating the self from certain other (Muslim) minority groups; resisting Arabic influence on Persian; and endorsing racially loaded norms of appearance and beauty, the research participants claim an exceptional, perhaps ‘unexpected’ position. This positioning, moreover, entails hard work and a gradual process based on which the extent of liberation from old backward ideas and sensibilities and inclusion into secular Dutch society can be measured. Non-­religiosity, more than a matter of mere self-­positioning, pertains to different levels of the interlocutors’ everyday life through which space outside

Vacillating in and out of whiteness 195 religion is claimed, while racial (dis)identification refers to more implicit and sometimes contradictory concerns of belonging. The former requires an unambiguously sceptical attitude towards religiosity, the latter is subjected to both conflicting and corresponding understandings of whiteness and Iranianness. Both, however, are entangled with Dutch, transnational, and Iranian historical notions of the modern and secular ‘us’ versus the Muslim and Arab backward ‘other’. Simultaneously, a counter-­narrative seems to be emerging in which particularly the younger generation Iranian-­Dutch embraces their ethnic, religious, and migrant background and seeks solidarity with other minority groups in a fight against racism and Islamophobia. Probing non-­religiosity and racial (dis)identification among the Iranian-­ Dutch is revealing for the constructions of whiteness. Whiteness is imagined as a space or mode of invisibility, which can be achieved through developing secular and modern sensibilities and attitudes as well as specific embodied performances, such as drinking, dancing, and hair bleaching. Paradoxically, the same set of practices place the Iranian-­Dutch in an exceptional position compared to other minority groups with an Islamic background; an exceptional position that is deliberately appropriated by the research participants as an indicative part of their attempts at rebuilding the self. While invisibility is the goal, the process to achieve invisibility entails exceptionality and thus visibility. This visibility, in fact, is a requirement for the transformation from tradition to modernity, from religiosity to secularity, and from non-­ whiteness to whiteness. Simultaneously, this transformation appears to be ambiguous and porous. Self-­insertion in the category of whiteness does not necessarily lead to refuting one’s own cultural and ethnic background. Certain non-­Islamic, yet religiously rooted festivities have remained popular (Yalda, Nowruz, and Charshanbe Suri), and denying the Iranian background and refusing to speak Farsi are frowned upon. Moreover, despite all their efforts for inclusion, the Iranian-­Dutch are still subjected to a negative image of ‘Muslim other’ and discrimination, which points at a racialised master category in the post-­9/11 era linking Arab, Middle Eastern, and Muslim communities. While some of the research participants manage to appear as Dutch or Italian, others (mostly men) have to face similar racial and religious prejudices as the Turkish-­Dutch and the Moroccan-­Dutch. Vacillating in and out of whiteness, the case of the Iranian-­Dutch illustrates some of the fragility and the power dynamics of this social construct.

Notes 1 This is a reference to the book Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon (1952), which engages with a sense of inferiority among colonised people and identification with the ideology of the colonial agency. 2 In fact, the snowball sampling appeared inadequate to find self-­identified religious Iranian-­Dutch, and I had to actively ask around, which finally led to contacting and interviewing a small number of Muslim Iranian-­Dutch people. Although the

196  Rahil Roodsaz experiences of the latter group is not the focus of this chapter, the difficulty to find and approach them for participation is revealing for their marginal positionality and the dominance of secular sentiments in the wider Iranian-­Dutch community. 3 According to Maghbouleh (2017, 55), to the older-­generation Iranian-­Americans, Zoroastrianism is an ancient monotheistic antecedent for Western Christianity through which an Iranian history of whiteness is created. 4 See Maghbouleh (2017, 54–58) for a comprehensive discussion of the figure of Aryan in the creation of an Iranian history of whiteness.

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10 Women wearing the tallit Tracing gender, belonging, and conversion of new Jewish women Lieke L. Schrijvers Introduction In our shul,1 women can perform services, pray aloud, we’re called for roles in service, wear a tallit.  .  .  . But to be honest, I  don’t wear a tallit myself either. It doesn’t feel right. I can’t really explain why, but it doesn’t feel right. Naomi

Naomi2 is a woman in her late twenties who became Jewish when she was 19  years old, which is an exceptionally young age considering the challenging study trajectories of converts. Naomi and I met in 2018 in the context of my dissertation research about women’s conversion.3 Converting to Judaism as a non-­Jew, called giyur, is often a yearlong process in which giyur-­candidates participate in synagogue services and social life, learn (Biblical and Modern) Hebrew, begin to eat kosher, and keep Shabbat rest. The process often also includes negotiating different gender norms. Traditionally, shul life is rather patriarchal and active participation is reserved for men, while women take on most responsibilities for ritual life at home. In the past century, calls for change and modernisation resulted in – among others – the establishment of so-­called liberal synagogues, where there is less clear gender segregation in ritual life outside of the home. In this chapter, I analyse the different materialisations of such gender discourses in relation to belonging as a newcomer, like Naomi. Jewish tradition is known for its emphasis on ritual and bodily regimes, and for its segregation on the basis of gender. In recent decades, there have been many studies about lived religion of (Modern and Strictly/Ultra) Orthodox women that particularly focus on gender conservatism (cf. Avishai 2008; Davidman and Greil 1993; Kaufman 1991; Longman and Schnitzer 2011). Less attention has been given to gendered dynamics in non-­Orthodox, or Liberal, forms of Judaism (e.g. Brasz 2016; Weissler 2007). Gender equality has been one of the prime topics by which Liberal Judaism came to distinguish itself from Orthodoxy globally, particularly in the Netherlands. A symbol of these differences in gender dynamics between Liberal and Orthodox groups is the use of the prayer shawl with fringes (tallit) by women during prayers in the synagogue. Wearing a tallit marks their inclusion as active members

200  Lieke L. Schrijvers of the minyan,4 which is limited to men in Dutch Orthodox Judaism but can include women in Liberal synagogues. I undertook fieldwork in different Liberal and Reform communities in the Netherlands, primarily located in the broader Amsterdam urban area. I am not Jewish myself, so I was in many respects an outsider to these communities. In the broader research that this chapter is based on, I included women who converted to all forms of Judaism, but limit myself here to the 14 non-­Orthodox converted women, as well as six interviews with Liberal rabbis. The tallit appeared from my research material as one of the most important symbols of belonging, but also as something contested among liberal converted women and their congregational surroundings. Even though the option to wear a prayer shawl was often seen as an indication of gender equality, some women rejected the use or take on a particularly ‘female’ tallit. In order to understand the importance of the tallit in converted women’s practices, the next section first gives a brief historical overview of Liberal Judaism in the Netherlands, after which some theoretical considerations of conversion are provided. The third part focuses on the role of the tallit in women’s Judaism more broadly, before turning to the different ways converted women relate to the practice.

Dutch Liberal Judaism In the 19th century, different groups of Jews responded to challenges from modernisation in different ways. With the rise of feminist movements and capitalism came Liberal Judaism, a self-­defined ‘modern’ form of Judaism that became mainly popular in western European, white, and higher-­class Jewish communities. These developments led to the establishment of the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ) in 1926 (Kaplan 2000). I was told by my interlocutors that the main renewal in Liberal Judaism focused on the interpretation of the Torah and its commandments (mitzvot). Up until today, Orthodoxy is perceived as determined by strict adherence, while Liberal Judaism considers the guidelines as adaptable to contemporary times. With this liberal modernisation came a reinterpretation of gender segregation in ritual life. However – contrary to common discourse – the assumption that orthodox equals conservatism, while liberal implies progressiveness, is not clear-­cut. Even though Liberal Judaism often invokes terms such as equality in its self-­representation, there are different ideas and performances of gender that cut across Orthodox/Liberal lines. With the rise of Liberal Judaism also came the common term to describe non-­ Liberal communities as Orthodox. Daniel Boyarin argues that the term Judaism  – as referring to a religion  – is a modern invention, traced to 18th-­century Germany and heavily influenced by Christian understandings of religions. In this genealogy, Boyarin considers the notions of Liberal and Orthodox as two sides of the same modern Jewish coin (Boyarin 2018). Dutch Orthodox rabbis such as Rabbi Raphael Evers and Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs actually prefer to use the term ‘traditional Judaism’

Women wearing the tallit  201 [traditioneel jodendom] instead of Orthodox, because of its negative connotation. The term ‘orthodox’, argued Chia Longman, carries in it notions of anti-­modern backwardness. This creates a false assumption that orthodox is somehow unchanging and fixed (Longman 2008). Another reason to question the presumably clear Orthodox/Liberal distinction is that Jacobs and Evers do not consider Liberal groups rightfully Jewish and “Liberal Judaism” thus as a contradiction. Important for this chapter, neither do Orthodox rabbis recognise Liberal converts as Jews (de Vries 2004). In spite of these official differences, in practice there certainly is mutual respect between Orthodox and Liberal rabbis and groups. Although they don’t see eye to eye on religious levels, they collaborate when it comes to socio-­political issues, for example, in the joined efforts to counter anti-­semitism, and in the recent debate on ritual slaughter (Valenta 2012). The terms Orthodox and Liberal were furthermore commonly used by my interlocutors – including rabbis – which is why I do use these, but merely as a descriptive emic term. Liberal and Reform communities today New forms of Liberal Judaism were successfully introduced in the Netherlands in 1931, when the first Liberal synagogue was founded in Amsterdam (Brasz 2016). The Jewish community in the Netherlands nowadays is small, consisting of between 35,000 and 50,000 people (depending on the definition used), and a large portion of this group is not a member of a particular synagogue.5 The Shoah has had an inconceivable impact on Dutch Jewry, when around 75 percent of the 140,000 Jews perished (Croes 2004). After World War II, only 50 people continued life in the Liberal shul in Amsterdam. Since then, Dutch Liberal Judaism has appeared surprisingly successful and resilient: the group grew to 3100 members in the past years (Wertheim, Frishman, and De Haan 2011). The Orthodox synagogues continue to have most members and synagogues in total, and are connected in the Organisation of Jewish Community (Nederlands Israelisch Kerkgenootschap, NIK).6 Yet the impact of the Liberal Jewish Community (Liberaal Joodse Gemeente, LJG) with its nine synagogues should not be underestimated. Just like the NIK, the LJG has its main location and community in Amsterdam, with the largest shul currently in the neighbourhood of Buitenveldert. Many LJG members I spoke with over the course of this research reiterated the idea that Liberal Judaism implemented modern notions of women’s emancipation more than their Orthodox neighbours and regarded this the most important difference. A Liberal rabbi explained the adaptation to modernity in the Dutch LJG to me as follows: In Orthodoxy, the exemption of certain mitzvot was changed to a sort of prohibition. From ‘you don’t have to do it’, to ‘you aren’t allowed to do it’. . . . First, [we believe that] if you say you don’t have to, doesn’t mean

202  Lieke L. Schrijvers you shouldn’t be allowed to. And second, a hundred years ago women weren’t even allowed to study, something which wouldn’t be accepted nowadays. So the world back then . . . you see, there were no women at all as political or religious leader. That wasn’t a particular feature of Judaism, but a worldwide phenomenon. All of that has changed, so this should change too. Bracha An important expression of the change Bracha refers to is the ability to take part in the minyan. In Orthodox shuls, only adult Jewish men are part of this group, and assigned the primary role in ritual services and practices outside of the home.7 LJG congregations made a ground-­breaking change in this regard by including adult women in the minyan; permitting them to take on ritual tasks; and allowing men and women to sit together during service. That being said, some elements are less likely to change, for example in the roles actually taken on by women during services, and the stance toward LGBTQ issues. Some shuls provide a wedding blessing ceremony for same-­sex couples, but this is not an officially recognised Jewish marriage (chuppah). The character of the service in general is quite traditional, which is why the LJG has been seen as more similar to US Conservatism than American Reform Judaism. More recently, two independent Reform shuls were founded in the Netherlands. Just as Liberal and Orthodox, I use this term Reform merely on an emic level. In many countries, Liberal and Reform are used interchangeably and refer to a similar tendency. In the Netherlands, by contrast, the Reform shuls differ significantly from the LJG synagogues, especially on the issue of gender. The Reform shuls are known for their explicit gender equality and LGBTQ-­friendly policy and discourse, while the LJG is more conservative on these issues. There are collaborations with the LJG but some important differences as well. Reform Judaism in the Netherlands developed out of the same liberalising tendencies during the 19th century and is part of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Typically, the services are less formal and more musical than those in LJG or Orthodox synagogues, and they are explicitly open to non-­Jewish people. In the Netherlands, Reform synagogues advocate for the acceptance and celebration of sexual diversity, and both hetero-­and homosexual couples are allowed to have a chuppah wedding ceremony. This form of progressive Judaism is marginal, with the first synagogue founded in 1995. In 2003, the same shul was the first in the country to have a female rabbi, with the appointment of Elisa Klapheck. Compared to other countries, this was rather late.8 The LJG followed in 2008, with Hetty Groeneveld as first woman rabbi. Nowadays, five of the eight smaller LJG synagogues outside of Amsterdam have a female rabbi, as do the two independent Reform shuls. Among their members are people who were born to a Jewish mother, but also people who became Jewish later in life after a giyur trajectory. This latter group is the focus of the rest of this chapter.

Women wearing the tallit  203

Embodied conversion and ritual objects “Becoming Jewish”, I  was told by a rabbi, “is not about knowing Judaism, it’s about feeling Jewish.” This ‘feeling’ took time to take shape and to become engrained in a person’s day-­to-­day existence. A giyur process often takes years of classes, self-­study, and participation in the synagogue. Different from most religious groups, Jewishness is not self-­assigned but determined by a rabbinical court, which decides whether converts can “become part of the Jewish people and religion”, as the official definition of giyur reads. Conversion in a Liberal synagogue tends to be somewhat easier on an institutional level than in Orthodox communities, where there is hardly any support from rabbis or teachers. The suspicion toward newcomers by Orthodox (or ‘traditional’) communities is known across the whole Dutch Jewish community. When not immediately rejected, people interested in Orthodox conversion undertake long individual studies without clear expectations. Liberal groups take a different strategy and tend to be more open to newcomers, especially those with a Jewish father but not mother. For potential converts, such Liberal or Reform communities are often easier to access, and they offer an organised study programme. The Reform shuls differ from the LJG in that they accept everyone with at least one Jewish parent as a full Jew, and thus member. The LJG only recognises those born to a Jewish mother as Jewish, but the giyur trajectory tends to be more accessible for ‘father-­Jews’ than for people without any Jewish family.9 Notwithstanding these differences among Orthodox, Liberal, and Reform processes, almost all interlocutors described their process as intense, life-­altering, and at times difficult. Converts study for years, while implementing Jewish traditions in their daily life. Becoming part of the people means a reconfiguration of kinship bonds and gaining a different sense of Jewish history, of the Shoah, and at times changing perceptions and performances of gender and sexuality. It has often been argued that conversion is not a mere change in worldview or mindset, but rather an embodied process of subject formation (Sachs Norris 2003; Winchester 2008). In such an approach, conversion is considered to encompass a conscious and performative learning of a new habitus. Lewis Rambo and Charles Farhadian moreover recognise the significance of the human body as a particular theme in contemporary conversion studies (Rambo and Farhadian 2014, 8). This is in line with more recent developments in the study of religion, with its emphasis on lived religion and religious materiality. This approach to ‘material religion’ does not only include the human body, but particularly pays attention to objects used in rituals. Birgit Meyer, a scholar on the forefront of material religion, argued: “In order to account for the richness and complexity of religious experience, we need theoretical approaches that can account for its material, bodily, sensational and sensory dimension” (Meyer 2006, 27). Such a perspective toward religion thus focuses on the material and bodily aspects of religion, including the study of religious experience through the uses of ritual objects.

204  Lieke L. Schrijvers Another field that constitutes part of my theoretical approach is the study of gender in conversion. According to Eliza Kent, gender as a category of analysis does not simply follow from attention to the body, but a critical gender perspective is valuable for the whole field of scholarship. She states that “[o]ne of the most important contributions of feminist scholarship on conversion has been to demonstrate incontrovertibly that religious conversion entails not merely a change of worldview or ethos, but a change in lifeworld” (Kent 2014, 319). In various studies, gender and sexuality have come up as important features in conversion trajectories, especially in studies of women’s religiosity. By far, most anthropological research on women’s conversion in the Global North focuses on Muslim converts (Van Nieuwkerk 2006; Vroon-­Najem 2014; Peumans 2012).10 One of few larger studies of women’s conversion to Judaism outside of Israel was undertaken by Lynn Davidman. In her ethnography about Orthodox converts (1993), Davidman does not provide a thorough definition of conversion beyond an emic understanding. In a more recent interview with Dusty Hoesly, Davidman proposed the following working definition: “[C]onversion is a shift in one’s discursive universe, social relationships, and embodied practices, a new role learned through language, behavior, and interpersonal boundary maintenance” (Hoesly and Davidman 2016). I follow a similar approach to conversion, but with particular attention to gender. I found that processes of Jewish converts’ self-­making are directly related to questions of gender and the possibility of taking on certain objects and tasks, among which the tallit appeared as the most significant religious object. In this chapter I aim to bring together the focus on material forms of religion with the study of conversion and gender. I therefore deliberately start from the material and ritual aspect of conversion and religious life from the tallit. As such, I take a step away from the dominant focus on conversion narratives of the interlocutors themselves. In order to understand this garment and its incorporation (or lack thereof) in a convert’s religious practice, I first describe the materiality and use of this object in further detail.

The tallit The roughly fifty people in the small synagogue on Saturday morning sing the Hebrew hymns to open the Shabbat service. A kaddish announces the next part of the service, the prayers. About half of the congregants reach to their prayer shawl and give an inaudible blessing, only noticeable by their closed eyes and lip movements. They carefully place the shawl across their shoulders, some cover their entire shoulders as a blanket, others wear it more like a cape. I  recognise a few of the women here because I  recently interviewed them. I know that not so many years ago, attending a shul service was as new for them as it is for me today. One of them is Leah, a woman in her sixties who became Jewish less than a decade ago. She stands next to her Jewish husband, and both partners wear the thick white woollen garment with fringes around their shoulders. Halfway through the service, the rabbi

Women wearing the tallit  205 calls for ‘Leah bat Avraham v’Sarah’ to step forward. Leah approaches the bimah and gives me a smile when our eyes cross. Together with the singer, the chazzan, Lea sets out to read the weekly passage of the Torah for about five minutes. She thanks the rabbi with a firm handshake. When she steps down and looks at me again, she cannot hide the tears in her eyes. When Leah became Jewish, she became the daughter of Abraham and Sarah, something confirmed with the white woollen cloth with fringes around her shoulders. (fieldwork notes, February 2018)

The tallit is a ritual garment that “symbolizes and activates both a social tie to a people (through a shared past) and a religious obligation to follow a righteous life (God’s commandments) in the present” (Emmett 2007, 78). It is worn during prayers, and is a tool to enhance the connection to God (also G-­d, or the Eternal). The traditional prayer shawl is a white blanket-­like shawl of about 1.5 meters by 2 meters in size. It is called a tallit in Hebrew or a talles in Jiddish; the first is most common in the Netherlands. There are no requirements for the fabric in the Halacha (Jewish law), besides the general rule that prohibits the combination of wool and linen in garments.11 Most often, the shawl is made of thick white wool and has either black or blue stripes across the narrow sides. The shawl itself has no particular religious significance, but the fringes (tzitzit) added to the four corners of the tallit are important, which serve as a reminder of God’s commandments.12 Wearing these tzitzit used to be an all-­day practice as a reminder of the commandments and as an enactment of piety.13 Nowadays, the fringes are only a part of the daywear of strictly-orthodox Jewish men in the form of a tallit katan: a smaller tallit worn underneath one’s clothing, but this is not an obligation for the vast majority of Jews.14 During morning prayers and shul services, however, all observant Jewish men are expected to wear the traditional prayer shawl with its tzitzit, called tallit gadol. In what follows, I will focus on this last shawl and use the term tallit to refer to the prayer shawls, leaving the katan aside. Before the prayer shawl is put on during prayers in shul or at home, a blessing is given.15 After the blessing, the tallit is worn over the shoulders (as either a cape or a blanket covering the shoulders) for the most part of the service and over the head for the central prayers. Important to keep in mind for this current chapter is that only halachic Jews are allowed to wear it. Male – and some female – converts start wearing it only after they have undergone the ritual immersion in the mikveh16 that signifies their entrance to Judaism. Women’s talliot As it is with many of the mitzvot, women are ‘exempt’ from wearing a tallit. In Liberal Judaism, this interpretation changed to signify something that is optional, rather than forbidden, which is why the dominant opinion holds that women should be allowed to wear it, should they wish to do so.

206  Lieke L. Schrijvers This more gender-­inclusive policy was not met with open arms by all of the LJG. Several rabbis told me about this, three of whom were among the first women to be appointed rabbi since 2008. Rabbi Liesbeth told me during our two-­hour conversation what becoming a rabbi, and wearing a tallit, had meant for her and her community: On the one hand, I always said I’d never become a rabbi [in my hometown],

because I had to fight for the position of women for forty years. . . . Eventually, I  did go back. And I’ve always said, when I  become a rabbi, I’ll wear a tallit. I won’t do a service when I’m not wearing my tallit. LS:  Why not?  It’s part of the deal. It’s written in the Torah and is part of it all, and it doesn’t matter if I’m a man or woman. I took on this commandment, and I have to be consistent with it. Besides that, it’s sort of a uniform: a police agent wears a uniform, a rabbi wears a tallit. . . . Once I was appointed there, they knew I’d wear a tallit and it was no problem, it has never been up for debate. Liesbeth currently wears a tallit made by the organisation Women of the Wall in Jerusalem. This group of, mainly Israeli, women strive for the right to wear prayer shawls and pray aloud at the Western Wall. Since 2016, praying aloud is no longer permitted for women at the Wall, which resulted in women from all denominations, including Orthodox women, to come together in protest services at the Wall, often leading to arrests. Influenced by this and other Jewish feminist movements, the tallit came to symbolise women’s pious practice and quest for equality in Jewish ritual life. According to Ayla Emmett, the practice of women wearing a prayer shawl should be recognised as “historically groundbreaking” (Emmett 2007, 79). Emmett argues that the tallit is a garment that became loaded with symbolic value: “Women who have taken to wrapping themselves in ritual garments such as the tallit signify a monumental change in a long tradition of a gendered synagogue”(2007, 79). In a same manner, the tallit appeared particularly important for my interlocutors in Liberal synagogues. Like the tallit of Rabbi Liesbeth, nowadays not all talliot (plural) are made in the traditional way (thick wool, white with blue stripes). The past years have seen an increase in so-­called women’s talliot, specifically designed to cater to the wishes of pious Jewish women, both Orthodox and non-­Orthodox (Weissler 2007). In answer to  – mainly US and Israeli  – Jewish women’s desires to wear a tallit, a market developed for (non-­traditional) women’s talliot.17 Such a tallit can be made of the same heavy white wool as the traditional one, but for example have pink stripes instead of dark blue. More often, women’s prayer shawls are made of light silk fabric and are smaller in size than the traditional shawl. These silk versions are often white with

Women wearing the tallit  207 pink or golden embroidery, or sometimes made of bright colours or prints. Prices of these shawls are typically between 200 and 250 euros, which is about thrice as much as a traditional tallit. The latter can usually be borrowed in synagogues as well, while women’s talliot are individually purchased, often handmade in Israel. The availability of women’s talliot next to the ‘traditional’ tallit marks the practice of wearing this garment a particular gendered undertaking. These women reject the idea that women should not be allowed to wear it, or to pray aloud, and begin to wear the prayer shawl. At the same time, the difference between men and women is clearly marked because of the visible difference in materials and colours of the talliot, and thus can be said to maintain a clear separation on the basis of gender.

Converted women and the tallit Some women in my fieldwork wore a traditional tallit, others a ‘woman’s tallit’, and even others only wore it when they’d be called upon in service. Quite a few did not practice at all. Rabbi Tamar told me that she often asks giyur candidates if they will wear a tallit after their conversion: “We can’t impose it, but I do always ask women the question: ‘Will you wear a tallit?’ Partly to just get them to think about it. . . ‘I am allowed to do it, but do I want to?’ ” Before turning to the different answers to this question, I will provide some more background information on the different gender discourses among my interlocutors, which are crucial if we want to understand the significance of the prayer shawl. In the paragraph thereafter, I give the examples of five interlocutors as exemplary for the different positions women have toward the tallit. Gender discourses Gender dynamics were often a factor in deciding to pursue a Liberal rather than Orthodox giyur, besides the apparent difficulty (or, according to some, near impossibility) of Orthodox conversion in the Netherlands. I  met 14 non-Orthodox women, quite a few of whom reflected on their community with terms such as equality [gelijkheid, gelijkwaardig, inclusief] and progressiveness [progressief, vooruitstrevend, geëmancipeerd]. About half of these interviewees had a view of gender as ‘complementary difference’, as Joan Scott called it in her book Sex and Secularism (2018). In such a framework, men and women are considered to be essentially different  – based on biological determinism  – but to have equal value. This is similar to the notion of ‘equity discourse’, which is more common in research with Muslim women (Van Nieuwkerk 2006; Jouili 2015). This perspective of complementary difference is then different from a Liberal feminist ‘equality discourse’, which is a more gender constructivist idea, which holds that biological difference should not predetermine social roles. Even though Liberal Judaism has a strong self-­image of gender equality, I found that both discourses of equity and equality informed the perspectives to gender difference

208  Lieke L. Schrijvers of my interlocutors, such as 42-­year-­old converted Karen, who is a member of a Reform synagogue: I think that women have equal value [gelijkwaardig] to men. . . . I also believe that we’re equal when it comes to gathering in the same place and doing the same prayers: we shouldn’t have to sit separately. But personally, I don’t think it’s necessary that a woman wears men’s clothes. I don’t think so, no, but that’s my personal opinion. Karen I asked all women what this ‘equal value’ looked like, and consisted of in their community. Most interlocutors had an answer similar to Judith: Well, it means that you don’t have to sit somewhere high and hidden. Yeah . . . that you can just celebrate with each other. And that you can have a female rabbi too . . . what I . . . well . . . the rabbis all wear a kippah, including the women. Yeah personally, that bothers me. Strange as that may seem. Judith Judith – who will be introduced more fully in the next paragraph – described equality in terms of equal access: to space (women don’t have to sit on the balcony “high and hidden”); to celebrations; and to positions of authority. At the same time, she notices a “strange feeling” of being bothered by women who wear a kippah (round cap traditionally worn by Jewish men) just like Karen expressed with regards to “men’s clothes”. In their view of inclusion, feeling uneasy with women wearing “men’s clothes” appears strange, because – I argue – it is not consistent with their overarching view of equality as inclusion. In other words, there appeared to be some limits to the ideals of equality and instead a tendency toward an ‘equity’ discourse in which men and women are to some extent separated. Materialisations of equality Whenever I asked converts how the gender equity or equality was expressed in their shul, the tallit often came up as a symbol and example of women’s inclusion in ritual practice. I was motivated to analyse this practice more when I spoke with LJG convert Deborah: D:

Some things [in our shul] are deliberately progressive. Many women wear a prayer shawl, a tallit. . . . In orthodoxy there are certain things women can’t do, like praying with a tallit or wearing teffilin.18 You see what happens at the Wall in Jerusalem, Orthodox people and women who want to pray with a tallit are nearly fighting at the Wailing Wall! Because [these women] have a strong egalitarian idea that they want to have the same duties and responsibilities, they want to do the same as men.

Women wearing the tallit  209 LS:  Do you mean that those duties should be the same for everyone? D: Yes. Duties, but it’s also about rights. It’s quite a common desire among

women to want to have the right to pray with a prayer shawl.

After Deborah converted, she started wearing the tallit. I noticed during participant observation that only a small minority of LJG women actually wears a prayer shawl in service, while a majority of Reform women do. Some other women, like Leah, only wear it when they know beforehand that they will be called upon in service, or during their Bat Mitzvah. In the Reform group, there were also women who wore a kippah, or something similar. I did not meet any congregants in the LJG who do so, nor who would like to wear a kippah. This was mainly because it was not part of “Jewish tradition”. The call to wear a kippah mainly came from the rabbis I spoke with, although they are often careful in voicing these wishes so as not to alienate more conservative members of their community. LJG rabbi Tamar, who was born Jewish, told me about this: Formally, men and women are equal. Women can wear a tallit here, but not a kippah. And that’s very strange, I don’t get it . . . but anyway, we have a notion of minhag hamakom, which means ‘the local habit’. You adapt yourself to what’s common in that particular shul. . . . It’s very strange to me that as a woman, I can wear a tallit but not a kippah. LS:  What are the arguments for that? T:  It has nothing to do with the halakha, so not with the Jewish law, but more with what people are used to. T:

The aforementioned Women of the Wall movement includes women from all denominations, but in the Netherlands, these type of struggles for women’s equality in shul are mainly undertaken by Reform, and some LJG, Jews. So far, this is all still rather similar to other studies of born Jewish women’s use of the tallit (cf. Emmett 2007; Weissler 2007). What I find interesting, in the case of converted women, is that the tallit can be experienced as an important marker of belonging to the Jewish people and confirmation of the newly acquired status. On the one hand, the possibility of women’s full participation in shul was considered an important and desired marker of equality. On the other hand, some women did prefer some form of gender segregation during service, where women do not “wear men’s clothes”, to use Karen’s words, referring to a kippah or tallit. This points to a paradox in gender roles and performances, and shows that ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ discourses often overlap in daily life practices. Different strategies After coding the outcomes of my research, I found five different strategies for dealing with the tallit among my interlocutors, which all point to a different meaning given to the same material object of the prayer shawl.

210  Lieke L. Schrijvers As such, the tallit can have different interpretations and uses, ranging from radical gender equality to marking the otherness of converts. The following strategies can overlap, but together they represent all the different stances I found among my interlocutors. As such, each story is a representation of more women thinking and acting along the same way. I  Emphasising equality – Aliza The most explicit advocate for a complete dismantling of gender difference in Jewish rituals was Aliza. Aliza is a converted woman who recently became a rabbi. She encourages women to wear a tallit in service, or to partake in more male-­coded parts of service, such as carrying the Torah scrolls. Since a rabbi’s role is not to prescribe certain acts, but to offer guidance and support, Aliza does not impose her opinion. Yet in one of our private conversations, she expressed her frustration with the reality of the Reform and Liberal Jewish community, where many people uphold traditional gender roles in practice. When she told me that she strives for equality, I asked her what this would entail. Aliza answered: Well . . . if everyone would wear a tallit, if everyone covers their head . . . if everyone can do everything during service, and does so. You know, not just can, but actually does it. . . . I think that if you want to be egalitarian, you have to act egalitarian. It’s all nice if you’re allowed to do it, but if no one does it, we don’t get anywhere. [emphasis in original] Aliza converted to Judaism when she was in her fifties, after she had discovered that her grandfather had been a Jew, something which was never spoken of in her family. She found her home in first a Liberal, and then a Reform synagogue, but this did not go without difficulty. Although she nowadays has an ideal of total equality for Jewish men and women, this was not always the case. She described how she had felt rather uncomfortable wearing a prayer shawl at first: There was a time in my life when I thought I wasn’t going to wear a talles, because women don’t do that. Even though I’m quite an emancipated person, I had to get used to it. . . . But I did [when I became a rabbi], because I figured ‘well, I can’t not wear it, I really have to start practicing.’ Similarly to Rabbi Liesbeth, Aliza considered a tallit a necessity for her role as rabbi, which gave her the final push to start practising. Wearing it nowadays feels “completely normal” to her, but she had to make herself familiar with the garment and its rituals, such as saying a blessing before putting it on. Besides a tallit, Aliza also wears a kippah, which is rather uncommon

Women wearing the tallit  211 among Jewish women, including women in her own synagogue. In her view, commandments about religious duties in services refer to people of all genders, which means that women would not be exempted from wearing ritual garments. II  Commitment – Deborah As stated before, wearing the tallit is also crucial for Deborah, yet not so much based on emancipatory ideals. Instead, Deborah pointed to the spiritual importance of prayer and the prayer shawl, and did not voice her wishes in terms of striving toward equality. Instead, the tallit had a primarily religious and pious connotation. Deborah became Jewish in her early thirties, after studying Hebrew for years. She joined a LJG synagogue and was involved in all kinds of shul committees when I  spoke to her. I actually came to the topic of the tallit because Deborah was the first to explicitly point to its importance: LS:  Why is it important for you D:   It’s something  .  .  . it is a

to wear a prayer shawl? part of praying. That’s one of the things I learned. If you start praying with a prayer shawl, you take on that obligation, and you should continue to do it. . . . For me, it’s something that has meaning for me, on a personal level, because it’s connected to Jewish prayer.

Having the ability to participate fully in (individual and group) prayers and fulfil the obligations, was very important for some women in the continuing reinforcing of piety. This is something not necessarily particular for the convert group, as the Women of the Wall also point to such pious desires in striving for their rights to pray, and this group includes both convert and non-convert Jewish women. The fact that Deborah became Jewish later in life did add an extra dimension to this meaning of the tallit. I asked her if she could explain what it means for her to wear it, and after she took some moments to think about it, she replied: For me it means that I’m really Jewish and I’m really committed in the moment. And also . . . that I fully grasp what is happening, that I know the prayers. I think it’s important that if I wear it, I should fully understand what I’m doing. Joining the prayers indicates, for Deborah, that she does not only have the right to wear it, but that she earned her right and place within the Jewish community. She shows that she knows her prayers and is committed, not only to herself or to God, but to her fellow Jews.

212  Lieke L. Schrijvers III  Imitation – Karen Karen then, the third example, sees the tallit in similarly emancipatory terms as Aliza, but rejects the practice for that same reason. Karen is a woman in her thirties who became Jewish (in the LJG) about eight years prior to our meeting and wishes to adhere to more, in her terms, ‘traditional’ forms of Jewish practice. This includes a segregation between men and women to some extent. Karen does value the possibility to sit with men during service. Because of this, she is able to participate on the same ground level, as opposed to Orthodox synagogues where she can’t follow the whole service because women often sit on a balcony. Yet equality in religious duties and rights should not mean that women try to “imitate men”. She said: You sometimes see women with a kippah or with a prayer shawl. That’s a step too far for me. I think that’s something typically masculine. I can’t explain why, I  can’t argue with facts or with hard texts or anything definite. It’s a feeling. I absolutely don’t see any need for it, and I even reject it. . . . It’s something, I don’t know, it evokes something inside of me. Aversion or something, I’m not sure, I can’t really explain. It evokes something like . . . well, I don’t see any value in it. I think it takes things too far, and I don’t like that. The response of Karen to women wearing a traditionally coded masculine garment, either a kippah or tallit, came from an emotional space. This is different from the motivations of the previous two women, who have a more rational approach and did not speak about their bodily feelings or emotions in the same regard. Karen, however, described a feeling of repulsion “inside of her”, which she cannot justify with texts or “anything definite”; in other words, which she cannot legitimise rationally for herself. IV  Passing – Naomi The fourth example is that of Naomi  – also quoted at the start of this chapter – who is currently active in the organisation of her LJG synagogue where not many women wear a tallit, even though women are allowed to do so. The following is an excerpt of one of our conversations: LS:  Do you wear N:    No, I don’t. LS:  Why? N:    I’m not

a tallit during service?

sure, to be honest. See . . . the thing is, if you take a look at our community . . . actually only people from an older generation who did a giyur wear a tallit. The older generation of women who’ve done a giyur. LS:  That’s quite a specific group.

Women wearing the tallit  213     It’s not a big group, but it is still a group. And also a bit . . . it’s a group of elderly feminists, in their fifties, sixties. . . . It’s a feeling. I have to be honest here, it’s partly because of group pressure – if I’m being totally honest – because actually no women from my generation wear a tallit. And that’s part of it. It would mean you’d profile yourself in a certain way. It may be childish, but it does influence [my decision]. Also considering my status, that I think . . . it’s difficult. LS:  Your status? N:    Well, both my status as giyur – the fact that I haven’t been Jewish for as long as others – and my status in shul. I think it would give some kind of signal. I find it difficult, and it’s something you just have to find a balance in. And quite frankly, there’s some anxiety . . . taking into account my status as a newer Jew . . . a fear of many older Jews that new Jews want to take over and change things too much. So concerning those issues, you have to be a bit cautious. Do I want to make a statement about these things or not? And for me, I don’t have the feeling that I would be a better Jew [dat ik beter Joods ben] if I do [wear the tallit]. N:

Naomi shows many similarities to my other interlocutors. Similar to Karen, she told me she doesn’t really know why she does not wear a tallit. By this, Naomi meant that she does not have any halachic or scriptural foundation to her decision. Similar to Aliza, she recognises the prayer shawl as a sign of equality, but in that case of a particular feminist agenda of some older converted women (who were quite similar in profile as Aliza herself). No younger women or born Jewish women use the prayer shawl, and Naomi is afraid that if she would, she would be perceived both as too feminist and as someone who did giyur. This might limit her sense of belonging and raise questions among her congregants about her Jewish status. She thus strives to ‘pass’ as a Jew in her community, and prefers not to stand out too much. Importantly, Naomi does not have any particular pious motivations to wear, or not wear, a tallit like Deborah had; Naomi does not feel she would be a ‘better Jew’ if she would. Some women of this second-­wave feminist generation do urge her to start practising. Especially because of her important role in shul life, some rabbis did urge her to start wearing a tallit. She doesn’t feel the need herself, but: “I’ve gotten some complaints about it from rabbis, too. That I don’t wear it. But that’s all from the older feminist female rabbis.” For other converted women, these rabbis, such as Liesbeth, Aliza, or Tamar, can function as an important role model as well. This was the case with Judith, the last example. V  Negotiation – Judith Judith was still in the process of learning as giyur candidate in a Reform shul when we met in the Fall of 2018, and no follow-­up interviews have

214  Lieke L. Schrijvers been undertaken at the time of this writing. We spoke a lot about her motivations and experiences in the giyur class. When I  asked her if she had thought about wearing a tallit once she is Jewish, she replied that this had actually been on her mind a lot. Similar to many other interviewees, Judith perceived equality between men and women as a good virtue of Liberal Judaism, but not to the extent that it eliminates gender differences altogether, because “a man is no woman, and a woman is no man.” Initially, she did not feel the need or wish to wear a tallit, because she considered this a “very masculine thing”. When she encountered an interview in a newspaper with a female rabbi, her view changed. Judith described this interview as follows: She [the rabbi] initially had the same feeling I  have: ‘Why would I? Why would I wear a prayer shawl?’ And that rabbi said the same thing I feel: that you’d just be imitating men. But then, the rabbi [told the interviewer] that she’d asked yet another rabbi about it, who had told her: ‘It can also help you to focus on your prayers. See it as something that will help you to concentrate on being together, on being one with the divine and with your prayer.’ And then she figured: ‘Yeah, if I look at it that way, it does make sense.’ So she had a tallit made by an artist. And it really suits her well, there’s a beautiful quote on it. . . . It made me think, well, perhaps I will do it. It has a great symbolic meaning for this rabbi and for her relationship with the Eternal. For Judith, the possibility of particularly female-­coded prayer shawls could provide a means to fully participate in service as a Jewish woman, while maintaining clear gender boundaries. This can be considered a form of negotiated adherence and compromise between different discourses of the role of women as equal to men, but also as differently marked based on religious tradition and text.

Discussion What is similar for these women is that wearing a tallit is often described in emotional and bodily terms. Deborah ‘feels’ she is recognised as a Jew when wearing the tallit, while Karen and Naomi ‘feel’ uncomfortable doing so. This confirms what has been argued throughout this book: religion is an embodied performance, and conversion is related to emotions, feelings, senses, and material objects. From the material object of the tallit, which can range from a thick white woollen shawl to a lightweight pink silk, I traced the different approaches to gender difference in Liberal synagogues in the Netherlands. The LJG and separate individual Reform shuls often pride themselves as adhering to values as women’s emancipation, at least in comparison to Orthodox Jewish communities, assuming that these do not employ the same modern values of gender. To the extent of institutional

Women wearing the tallit  215 access to authority positions, this is certainly the case. In Dutch reform Judaism, women can become rabbi, make up the minyan, and fully participate in service. For converted Jewish women in the LJG, gender norms and policies were often an important factor in pursuing a Liberal instead of an Orthodox giyur. The prayer shawl can be considered an example of the lived materialisation of Jewish gender norms. In the Netherlands, the tallit became a symbol of a liberal self-­image as modern vis-­à-­vis ‘conservative’ Orthodoxy – although internationally such efforts are not limited to non-­Orthodox women alone. In the case of converted women, the prayer shawl actually turned out to be rather contested and negotiated, just as much as their Jewish status can be questioned by their community. What I  have shown is that wearing a tallit is not an easy decision, and not all Liberal Jewish women share the same norms, desires, and feelings toward the tallit as a gendered ritual object. Instead, the notion of emancipation and equality is layered and performed in different ways. In this discussion I wished to untangle some of these layers and propose lines of future inquiry that can critically question hierarchical differences between concepts such as Orthodox and Liberal, traditional and modern, and oppressed versus emancipated. First, the sense of equality seems to be directed one-­way. Emancipation was mainly understood as the inclusion of women in traditionally male-­ coded spaces, but not the other way around. This was questioned by Rabbi Tamar, who would ideally encourage men to light the Shabbat candles as well; the female-­coded Jewish ritual par excellence. The one-­directedness of women’s equality discourse has been questioned recently by scholars as well, such as Esther Fuchs. Fuchs sees a broader trend in Jewish feminism in academia and social movements: The hegemonic definition of Jewish feminism in general assumes that gender inequality in Judaism is the result of accidental, historical oversights that can be addressed by proving that women are as devoted to, interested in, and protective of Judaism as their male counterpart . . . and is considered a success when Jewish women gain access to the same privileges, resources, and symbolic assets that have previously been the preserve of Jewish men. (Fuchs 2018, 29) Many interlocutors considered women’s emancipation to be a struggle for access to the same privileges and symbolic assets as Jewish men. For some, the equal access to spaces of ritual performance was important, but they distanced themselves from a mode of equality that required men and women “to wear the same clothes”. Such a discourse of gender can be called an equity discourse, or complementarity discourse, in which women and men are considered to have equal value but different roles and tasks in life. Looking at the daily religious practices, both notions of inclusion and gender

216  Lieke L. Schrijvers appeared to have different contested meanings, which were often carefully negotiated by the newcomers in the community. Second, not all aspects of the use of the tallit are exclusive for converts, but some elements are. Conversion to Judaism is contested in the communities, even discouraged by many. Getting access to the liminal status as ‘giyur-­candidate’ by no means secures a space within Judaism. Instead, candidates are asked to study and perform for many years until they, as my interlocutors said, “feel Jewish” and their subjectivity is transformed, internally and externally, in line with expectations of the rabbinical court. All Liberal converts had to think about wearing a prayer shawl at some point during their giyur trajectory, or were asked to consider it by their rabbis. The far majority of my interlocutors had a desire to belong, to be ‘passable’ as Jewish, and to become uncontested members of the community. On the one hand, the tallit could be a physical expression of belonging, since only Jewish people are permitted to wear one. For women such as Deborah, the tallit functioned as a confirmation of their Jewish self, but in some spaces where only converted women wore it – such as in the synagogue of Naomi – wearing a tallit could have the countereffect of marking women’s bodies as converted, and thus as different from people born to a Jewish mother. The widely shared desire to become unrecognisable as a convert thus could lead to both a wearing and a not-­wearing of the prayer shawl. Lastly, intergenerational differences played an important role in the perception of emancipation in general and the practice of wearing a tallit in particular. Many women over the age of 50, such as Aliza, were inclined to have a view of gender emancipation as total equality. Younger women showed more diversity, and some were not keen on a total elimination of a gender binary. This is partly influenced by second-­wave feminism in the Netherlands during the 1960s and 1970s, when a range of emancipatory movements struggled against the influence of religions (specifically the Christian church) and the unequal treatment of women by religious authorities. For my interlocutors who had been involved in these movements, or who came of age during this time, it was crucial to have access to ritual space and positions of authority. Nowadays, feminism has moved from legal and institutional spheres to social acceptance and recognition of multiplicity and diversity among women. Interlocutors younger than 45 often dismissed the views of their older-­generation feminist community members, opting for a less ‘radical’ understanding of women’s roles in shul. Future research could look into the impact of different types of feminism on women’s religious practices, or reflect more on the intersectional aspects of Jewish women’s struggles as impacted by other forms of difference such as race and class. To conclude, the aims of this chapter started out small: to trace the use of the tallit among converted women in the Netherlands. Starting from this one object, many layers of analysis, negotiations, and ritual practices came to the fore. Instead of narratives or official guidelines, I was interested in

Women wearing the tallit  217 the lived realities of converts and their material self-­making. Giyur, like all religious conversions, is a bodily process of transformation, played out in the use of certain kinds of objects. The tallit is not ‘simply’ a ritual object, but carries with it a whole history of women’s role in Judaism, liberalism, feminism, and senses of belonging in a group where one’s position is contested.

Notes 1 Yiddish for synagogue. Most research participants used the term shul/sjoel (in Dutch spelling) instead of synagogue or the Hebrew word Beit Knesset. The participants in this study (both Ashkenazi and Sephardi) tended to use a mix between Dutch, Yiddish, and Hebrew terms, and I will follow their language in this chapter. 2 All names are pseudonyms, and crucial information about the communities of my interlocutors has been omitted to ensure anonymity. Any resemblance to people with the same names is entirely coincidental. All interviews have been recorded, with informed consent, and transcribed. The author thanks Béracha Meijer for her help with the transcriptions. Translations from Dutch to English are by the author. 3 The research project includes three case studies in total. Besides Jewish women, it focuses on Pentecostal Christian conversion and Sunni Islamic (Beekers and Schrijvers 2020). 4 Group of 10 Jewish adults needed to hold a service, traditionally only men. 5 The national welfare organisation for the Jewish community in the Netherlands (JMW) estimated a number of 52,000 Jews in 2009, including everyone with at least one Jewish parent (Van Solinge and Van Praag 2010). According to the Organisation of Jewish Communities (NIK) there are 30,000 Jews. The NIK uses the halachic definition of matrilineal descent. This means that only people born to a Jewish woman are considered to be Jews. 6 Currently, Orthodox synagogues have the highest number of members and synagogues in the Netherlands, with about 4000–5000 active members and 40 synagogues. There is no specific synagogue for the 1500 strictly Orthodox Chasidic Jews; they are mainly members of one of the NIK congregations. 7 This does not mean that women are absent from Orthodox communities. Rather, because men historically had to spend quite a lot of time at the synagogue, women were traditionally the ones with jobs both in and outside of the home. 8 In 1972, Sally Priesand became the first ever publicly ordained female rabbi, at the New York City Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. In 1935, Regina Jonas was privately ordained in Berlin and the first female rabbi worldwide. 9 I was told by some rabbis that even though the giyur trajectory is formally the same, the LJG often uses the term ‘confirmation’ for so-­called father Jews instead of ‘giyur’. This is to acknowledge the Jewish history and family connection of these people. 10 There are some recent studies of conversion to Christianity in the Netherlands, but these often do not focus on gender (e.g. Klaver et al. 2017). 11 Lev. 19:19. 12 Num. 15:37–40. 13 Specifically, these strings and knots refer to the 613 mitzvot (commandments). The Hebrew word for these strings is tzitzit, which numerically adds up to 600. Each of the fringes contains eight strings and five knots, for a total number of 613 (Green 2000).

218  Lieke L. Schrijvers 14 Shulchan Aruch Siman 19 states: “Tzitzit are an obligation on the person and not on the item, in that as long as he is not wearing the tallit, he is exempt from (the obligation of) tzitzit (i.e. on that tallit). Therefore, one does not say a blessing regarding the making of the tzitzit, since there is no commandment except in wearing them.” 15 Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, asher kidishanu b’mitz’votav v’tzivanu l’hit’ateif ba-­tzitzit: Blessed are you, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to wrap ourselves in the tzitzit. 16 After their supporting rabbi believes the giyur-­candidate has learned enough about Judaism and practices a Jewish life properly, the candidate is invited to come before a Jewish rabbinical court, called a Beth Din. Once this court determines that the candidate can be allowed to join the Jewish people, there follows a ritual immersion in the Mikveh. 17 The marketing of women’s religious objects has mainly been discussed in relation to Islam, such as the emergence of Islamic modest fashion (cf. Tarlo and Moors 2013). 18 Both men and women are allowed to wear tefillin (phylacteries), but when I asked via email about this, one of my key informants, a rabbi, replied: “There are not many women in the LJG who wear tefillin, but neither are there many men. It’s an object with which most liberal Jews don’t feel connected. Perhaps also because there aren’t many daily prayers, this is mainly on Shabbat and holidays during which no tefillin are used.”

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Afterword: corporate, corporal, collective Reflections on bodies, genres, and the ongoing troubling of the categories of religion and the secular Pamela E. Klassen What is it for a human body to transform? How is transformation experienced from within, and how is it imagined from without? And what does ‘religion’, as a way of experiencing, organising, classifying, and governing bodies  – human and otherwise  – have to do with it (Lofton 2017)? The chapters in this book offer many points of entry into these questions, at levels both intimate and infrastructural. The authors engage in the perpetual work of analysing the conjunction of religion, secularity, embodiment, and power with a wide variety of sources, including life writing, ethnographic fieldwork, and bureaucratic documents. In this reflection, I pull out three themes discerned from my readings of the essays and from my generative conversation with many of the authors during a workshop near the end of the editorial process: classification and concept; narration and genre; and collectivity and the individual. But first, let me turn to two stories. I grew up in Canada during the 1970s, an optimistic yet uneasy era when children were taught that worldwide pollution could be addressed by convincing everyone to stop littering. At a time when nuclear disasters were a real and ongoing threat to the environment, we were encouraged to become youthful champions of anti-­littering campaigns expertly designed by North American corporations seeking to avoid state legislation that would limit their production of packaging and environmental waste. Instead of “Climate Strikes” and #FridaysForFuture, we were bestowed with anti-­litterbug stickers, T-­shirts, and television commercials featuring a white actor impersonating an Indigenous man who displayed a “deep, abiding respect” for the land (Dunaway 2015, 79). We were also convinced that it was in the national interest for us to become more physically active – to put on the “ ‘righteous armour’ of democratic warriors” and engage in a government-­run initiative called “ParticipACTION” (Lamb Drover 2014, 283). Students regularly

222  Pamela E. Klassen attempted the “Canada Fitness Award” test in school, which included running, jumping, doing sit-­ups, and, my own personal nemesis, flexed arm hangs, in return for being awarded gold, silver, or bronze patches in recognition of our accomplishments. To be clear, the pedagogy worked: I remain anti-­littering and pro-­fitness. As these examples show, however, efforts to transform bodies into virtuous and healthy creatures come from within and without, from powers and agencies that include racist tropes, corporate propaganda, and state interests as much as internal desires and embodied perseverance. Another story: by the time the 1980s came around, I  was a teenager, increasingly consumed by a fear of nuclear war that stemmed both from the wider political and cultural culture of the day and my own pacifist, Mennonite tradition. With millions of others, I watched a television mini-­series called “The Day After” (1983), a depiction of nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union (with Europe in the middle of it all) and participated in anti-­nuclear marches on the streets of Toronto and elsewhere. I was tormented by a recurring nightmare that I had the power to stop all the nuclear proliferation, if only I could find my way through a maze-­like Soviet factory to unplug a simple electrical cord. This was a heroic and absurd task that no matter how fast I ran in my dream, or how many Canada Fitness Award bronze badges I had stuffed in my closet, I could never achieve. At the same time, younger children of that ‘final’ Cold War decade were getting their own lessons in transforming bodies and dreaming of war 1980s-­style via one of the most successful toy and movie franchises ever. “Transformers”, or angular, masculine, gun-­toting robots that with a few twists turned into armoured vehicles with missile launchers, hit the North American toy stores in 1984, becoming a massive success largely with boys, their intended audience. As I learned recently in a conversation with some younger friends, the girls’ version of a transforming body toy in the 1980s was smellier, sweeter, and less forceful: Strawberry Shortcake dolls, Cherry Merry Muffin dolls, and Cupcake dolls all blurred the line between women, girls, and food, sometimes quite literally. The Cupcake doll, in which a scented plastic cupcake transformed into a tiny, white-­skinned female figure, was the toy equivalent of the party-­trick woman popping out of a cake, at the same time that she, along with Strawberry Shortcake and Cherry Merry Muffin, served as “representations of women as virginal ‘sweetmeats’ ” (Varney 1996, 267). I  am sure that many children queered their Transformers and Cupcake dolls during their play. At the same time, these toys embedded visions of gendered and racialised embodiment, national virtue, militarized policing, and appropriately active or passive physicality (violent men and consumed women) through their hard-­edged or supple, scented or unscented, transforming bodies. (Interestingly, on Wikipedia today, articles about Transformers still massively overshadow any and all articles about various versions of the girl-­cake doll.)

Afterword: corporate, corporal, collective 223 I tell these two stories both for theoretical and methodological reasons. Anytime scholars write about transforming bodies, they are called to reflect upon how their own changing experiences of embodiment shape what they are able to see, understand, and analyse as racialized, gendered, and variously mobile bodies. This is a question not so much about the ‘limits’ of one’s analytical capacities due to positionality, but more about the grounds for one’s ability to know and recognise the experience of another. Thinking about positionality as a generative analytical framework includes realising that the sources and the concepts we turn to as scholars are shaped by varying historiographies – by which I broadly mean earlier bodies of scholarship – and historicities, or the varying understandings of the role of history and our place in it, both as scholars and people of a specific time and place (Hirsch and Stewart 2005; Lum 2018). Similarly, when scholars of religion, in particular, seek to understand religion and the body, the sites for their reflection extend well beyond what might be considered conventional sources for the study of religion, such as texts, rituals, and art. They turn their attention to sites often unmarked as ‘religious’, such as state-­based fitness programs, health care, the gendered experience of play, corporate advertising campaigns, and more. Which brings me to the first theme of classification and concept. Unsurprisingly for scholars of religion, problems of definition, classification, and categorisation come to the fore in many of the chapters of Transforming Bodies and Religions. As Mariecke van den Berg puts it so well in her chapter, investigating the “power that is involved in keeping categories alive” (p. 105) is key to the work of the scholar of religion  – whether thinking about lines drawn between Christian and Muslim, religious and secular, Church and State, or woman and man. In her own reflection on “the spiritual dimension of transitioning” (p. 107), van den Berg makes a compelling case for considering gender transitions and religious conversion side by side, as moments in which people think deeply about the ways that categories actually matter for the ways they inhabit their bodies and relationships – or, to put it another way, the ways that categories such as man, woman, Christian, or Jew keep them alive or cut them off from sustenance. All the authors of Transforming Bodies and Religions invite their readers to think beyond dichotomies such as religious and secular, sometimes through invoking such dichotomies and sometimes by cross-­cutting them with concepts old and new, such as conversion, transition, and non-­religion. Reading across the diversity of contexts investigated in these chapters, it becomes eminently clear that it is always productive to think locally, temporally, and systematically within specific times and places to see the ways that gender, race, religion, and sexuality are both fluid and fixed, enabling and constraining. Categories – including that of the secular – do not move by themselves; they move with people, by people, and sometimes for people. How scholars go about following people and concepts on the move is a question of direct relevance to the second theme: narration and genre.

224  Pamela E. Klassen Appropriately for a book with “transforming” in its title, movement is a consistent theme across these chapters and is primarily addressed through analyses of bodies narrated by way of diverse genres. Trying to come to grips with testimonies of conversion, deconversion, retrenchment, persistence, and mortality, each of these chapters faces, in its own way, the need to balance normative, descriptive, and analytical writing with varying levels of reflexivity. Mustafa and Westerduin, for example, share a highly reflexive method of conversational frankness, as they engage in “exploring new vocabularies” to think through racism, religion, and justice by reflecting on their own “embodied knowledge” as Dutch women, Muslim and Christian. They hope to find these new words by “explicitly engaging with those epistemologies, experiences, and attitudes that are often not accepted as ‘academic’ or ‘scholarly’: familial histories, individual experiences, affective, political, and cultural memories we carry in our bodies, fragmented as these memories might be” (p. 135). In a differently auto-­ethnographic approach, Wiering reflects on how his height and his booming voice shapes how he is received by teachers and students in the classrooms he visits as a sexual health educator. Taking one step removed from the first-­person narrator, many of the chapters turn to memoirs as their primary sources, a genre of life writing most often characterised by self-­reflection about desired or achieved transformations, and which has its own Christian and secular precursors (Brooks 2000; Butler 2005; Klassen 2018). Milota reads with her medical school class the memoir of an American physician who confronts his own mortality. Van den Brandt reads several memoirs of women moving in and out of Islam and Judaism (to borrow the movement metaphor of Maria Vliek in a later chapter). She also highlights the complex intersection of professional privilege and religious vulnerability, reflecting on the story of a Dutch doctor and mother, an adult convert to Judaism who wakes up one morning to encounter the anonymous violence of anti-­Semitism on her doorstep. Similarly, van den Berg reads two memoirs by Jewish authors in an effort to place narratives of religious and gender transition in comparative perspective. As these textual readings show, autobiography and memoir are often very embodied genres in which transformations of the suffering and/or joyful body serve as evidence of a broader theological or political point. The power or agency to testify, credibly, in print or in person, however, is not universally shared among bodies, and depends heavily on class, education, racialised, and gendered access to mediation. Testimony is also inflected by religious or cultural traditions of life writing (Klassen and Lofton 2013). The fact that access to self-­authored print culture is a limited resource, even in the era of the internet, is one reason why ethnographers take to fieldwork methods to amplify the voices of those they want to hear speak. Several authors in the book turn to the ethnographic genre to present multiply reflexive ways of narrating the body in which the voices of the scholar and those interviewed intersect. Roodsaz elicits fascinating personal narratives

Afterword: corporate, corporal, collective 225 of Dutch-­Iranian women and men who “vacillate in and out of Whiteness” (p. 182) in a conflicted relationship with Islam, and with their ability to pass in a culture of largely unacknowledged white racism and a presumed secularity. Similarly, Vliek tells the stories of European Muslims “moving out of Islam” who do not necessarily want to remain fully practising Muslims, but also do not want to abandon these practices, or their families, altogether. Telling the stories of self and others, whether by way of memoir or ethnography, these chapters show, requires transparency about how a scholar collects such stories and transforms them into sites of knowledge, whether through reading, personal interaction, or observation. Our own choices of genre, both in terms of our sources and our writing, represent “sensational forms” in and of themselves (Meyer 2006). A third and final theme: transforming bodies may be both corporate and corporal, both a collective project and an individual endeavour. The varying scales at which something is considered a ‘body’ that has either power or agency, or both, can be endlessly reimagined. From the body of Christ and the body politic to the body of a pregnant woman or a drag queen, the chapters in this book point to many meanings of bodies and how these multiple and shifting meanings are often both constitutive of, and governed by, religion. Korte’s chapter on the reaction of the Roman Catholic Church to a Spanish drag queen performing as both the Virgin Mary and the crucified Christ in the same show reveals the lopsided and unpredictable power of the individual body in the face of corporate power. Similarly, van Raemdonck shows how ongoing debates over women’s reproductive rights  – meaning individual women’s access to both contraception and abortion – were shaped by big collectives (church organisations and NGOs) and small ones (feminist consciousness-­raising groups). Assigning the categories of secular and religious to such collectivities or to the notion of individualism in any fixed way requires a hermeneutic of suspicion, especially today as the frame of religious freedom is increasingly used to limit even ‘religious’ women’s reproductive freedom (Klassen 2019). The many chapters addressing questions of conversion and transition also insightfully demonstrate how these kinds of change are always both collective and individual processes of transformation. Moving in and out of one’s connection with Islam, Judaism, or Christianity requires both personal momentum and collective recognition or denial. As Schrijvers shows in her discussion of Jewish women who choose to wear a prayer shawl, or tallit, for some this is a radical decision for “monumental change” towards the equality of women, while for others it is more modestly the following of a commandment and a “symbol of belonging” (p. 200). But for all women who put on the tallit, the disjuncture between their individual female bodies and the collective historical tradition of the prayer shawl as a male garment requires them to have some answer for why they wear it. The age-­old tension between collectivities and the individual is of course not new to scholars of religion, women, or even secularity, and it is certainly

226  Pamela E. Klassen not new to those who think critically about ‘Europe’. Newly under pressure once again, the collectivity of Europe seems particularly vexed by what sort of power and agency can, and should be, attributed to religion in both individual and collective dimensions. As many of the chapters point out, the lines between racism and religious persecution are very blurry in the experience of many non-­white Europeans today, even when they consider themselves ‘non-­religious’. Here, I would recommend engaging with Judith Weisenfeld’s analysis of the “religio-­racial” in her analysis of Black new religious movements in the 20th-­century United States (Weisenfeld 2018). Weisenfeld shows that even when people work diligently at transforming their bodies into virtuous citizens of nations and pious adherents of a faith, the systemic racism of their wider societies and dominant neighbours leave them little room for movement. As an edited collection that comes out of a community of scholars who have thought alongside each other for several years, Transforming Bodies and Religions offers a valuable lens on how European scholars are engaging with and troubling categories of religion, the secular, and gender. At a time when these categories are actively being reimagined, newly politicised, and activated by a wide range of “powers and agencies” within and beyond Europe, this kind of reflection is necessary, refreshing, and timely.

References Brooks, Peter. 2000. Troubling Confessions : Speaking Guilt in Law & Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press. Dunaway, Finis. 2015. Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirsch, Eric, and Charles Stewart. 2005. “Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity.” History and Anthropology 16 (3): 261–274. Klassen, Pamela E. 2018. The Story of Radio Mind: A  Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klassen, Pamela E. 2019. “Contraception and the Coming of Secularism: Reconsidering Reproductive Freedom as Religious Freedom.” In Secular Bodies, Affects and Emotions: European Configurations, edited by Monique Scheer, Nadia Fadil, and Birgitte Schepelern Johansen, 17–30. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Klassen, Pamela E., and Kathryn Lofton. 2013. “Material Witnesses: Women and the Mediation of Christianity.” In Media, Religion, and Gender, edited by Mia Lövheim, 52–65. New York: Routledge. Lamb Drover, Victoria. 2014. “ParticipACTION, Healthism, and the Crafting of a Social Memory (1971–1999).” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 25 (1): 277–306. Lofton, Kathryn. 2017. Consuming Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lum, Kathryn Gin. 2018. “The Historyless Heathen and the Stagnating Pagan: History as Non-­Native Category?” Religion and American Culture: A  Journal of Interpretation 28 (1): 52–91.

Afterword: corporate, corporal, collective 227 Meyer, Birgit. 2006. “Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics, and Power Matter in the Study of Contemporary Religion.” Inaugural Lecture 6 October, VU University Amsterdam. Varney, Wendy. 1996. “The Briar around the Strawberry Patch: Toys, Women, and Food.” Women’s Studies International Forum 19 (3): 267–276. Weisenfeld, Judith. 2018. New World A-­Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration. New York: New York University Press.

Index

activism 138, 141, 151, 194 age 216 agency 7, 90, 224; religious agency 7 Amin, Camron Michael 183 Amir-Moazami, Schirin 161 – 162, 173 Asad, Talal 4, 25, 161 authenticity 14, 102 autobiography 106 – 108, 123; memoir 84 autonomy 83 – 84, 90, 102 Backer, Kristiane 86 – 89, 93 – 98 Balkenhol, Markus:172 belonging 135, 180, 209, 225; ethnic and racial belonging 151, 156, 191; and passing 213 blasphemy 60 – 62, 67 body: embodiment 156; and food 173; and politics 166, 221; and praxis 159; sick body 125 – 130 Boyarin, Daniel 200 Cady, Linell E. 20 Charon, Rita 123 – 133 Christianity 10; and science 128; and supersessionism 137, 146 – 147; and whiteness 142 – 143 classification 223 colonialism 9, 143, 146 – 147; and Christianity 10; postcolonialism 9, 136 conversion: and Christianity 106; and Islam 85 – 87, 89, 93 – 96; and Judaism 85, 88, 90 – 93, 109, 119, 203 – 204, 225; narratives of 83 – 85; politics of 85, 104 – 105; theory 12 – 13, 104 – 106 Csordas, Thomas 29 Dabashi, Hamid 184 Davidman, Lynn 161, 204

diaspora 182 drag 12, 59 – 71, 225; Drag Sethlas 19, 59, 69, 71 Emmett, Ayla 206 emotions 214; empathy 126, 128; happiness 118 Engelke, Matthew 24 Fadil, Nadia 25, 162 – 163 family, childhood 136 – 140, 147, 167, 222 Farahani, Fataneh 184 Fessenden, Tracy 20 Fuchs, Esther 215 Ganzevoort, R. Ruard 82 – 83 gender: concept 5, 69, 170; complementarity discourse 207; equality discourse 199, 208, 210, 215; feminism 7, 216; and roles 69, 187, 199, 202, 206 genre 79, 224 Gholami, Reza 183 Giddens, Anthony 105 Göle, Nilüfer 10 governing 19, 221 Hagar 143, 145 – 150 Hall, Stuart 10 health 12, 123 – 133 Hirschkind, Charles 4, 19 – 20, 24, 26, 55, 161 Holy See 46 – 48, 52 – 53 identity 2, 140 – 141, 161 intersectionality 9, 180, 184 Islam 6, 13, 159, 225; born Muslims 95; and dress 141, 164; ‘European Muslims’ 95, 97; and gender

Index  229 170 – 171; ‘the good Muslim’ 140 – 141; and identity 139; Islamophobia 148, 184; and race 11, 170; and rituals 167, 187 Jackson, Michael 82 – 83 Jansen, Willy 96 Jesus Christ 70, 144, 149 Judaism 12 – 13, 146 – 147, 199 – 220; and dress 111, 211 – 212; and gender 112 – 113, 210; Hasidism 109 – 113; and identity 109, 114; Liberal Judaism 199 – 200, 215; Mikvah 108, 111 – 113, 118; Orthodox Judaism; 85, 88, 90, 98 – 99, 114, 116, 200 – 201; and rituals 116, 205 Kalanithi, Paul 123, 125 – 132 Kent, Eliza 87, 204 Ladin, Joy 109, 113 – 118 Lax, Leah 102, 109 – 118 Lee, Lois 180 LGBTQ+ 6, 61, 202; and nationalism 6, 179 Lodge, Reid 107 Maghbouleh, Neda 185 Mahmood, Saba 7, 21, 25, 163 Mann, Reva 86 – 88, 90 – 91 Maus, Marcel 25 McAuliffe, Cameron 183 McFadden, Patricia 51 Meyer, Birgit 4, 203 migration 135 Moallem, Minoo 181 narrative 12, 77 – 79, 82 – 84, 86 – 87, 96 – 97, 136, 138, 148; narration 224; narrative ethics 124 – 125; storytelling 77, 79, 81 – 83, 87 – 88 nationalism 1, 6, 172; and citizenship 6, 225; homonationalism 6, 179 St. Paul the Apostle 145 performance 167 Phronesis 123 positionality 223 power 2, 141 – 142, 150 – 151; regimes of (im)mobility 183

race 10, 13, 188; critical race theory 10; and gender 9; racism 191; race-making 137; and religion 10, 180 – 182, 224 – 225; whiteness 13, 170, 181, 185, 195 Rambo, Lewis 203 Rasmussen, Mary Lou 24 – 25 religion: concept 3; leaving religion 155, 159, 173 – 174; lived religion 3, 13, 155, 163, 199; material religion 203; morality 163; piety 163, 211; ritual objects 204, 205 – 206; rituals 168, 205; and spirituality 14 Scheer, Monique 25 Schepelern Johansen, Birgitte 25 Schielke Samuli 163 Scott, Joan W. 6, 36, 64, 172, 207 secular: and body 4, 38 – 39, 161, 170, 174; non-religion 160, 165, 180 – 183, 194 – 195; post secularist perspective 5; religious-secular divide 137, 153, 223; secularity 4, 25 – 26, 54, 161 – 162; strategic secularism 48 – 49; trajectories 20 self: performance of 160 – 161; self-making 169, 173; subject formation 203 sexuality 1, 164, 172, 179; and education 36, 224; and pleasure 20–21, 44, 45; sexual and reproductive health 12, 19, 24, 43, 54, 225 Sexularism 172 Shilling, Chris 27, 28 social media 186 space 156, 208 transgender 102, 113 – 117; and autobiography 106 – 107; and crossdressing 115; and studies 103 – 106 Turner, Brian S. 160 Vaggione, Juan M. 47, 49, 50, 54, 55 Van Bokhoven, Suzanne 86 – 88, 92 – 93, 97 – 98 Vergaelen, Eva 86 – 90, 93 – 95, 97 – 98 Wekker, Gloria 181, 194 Western Wall 116, 206 Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika 84 – 85