Dans
le cadre d’une rencontre organisée par le CM2S, la chercheuse polonaise Monika
Bobako interviendra le 03 mai 2012 à 15h à la Faculté des Lettres & des
Sciences Humaines de Ain Chock (salle de conférence du CM2S) autour de ses
recherches sur les relations entre le féminisme occidental et la religion.
Abstract:
The aim of the seminar will be
to discuss difficult relations between Western feminism and religion and to
show that these relations are taking a new form in the contemporary context of
growing Islamophobia in the West. Traditionally, feminism as an offspring of
the Enlightenment thought has been associated with a secular project of human
emancipation that was highly critical of religiously sanctioned gender
hierarchies. However, for the last few years the growing number of the
mainstream Western feminists have been calling for rethinking feminism’s
attitude towards religion. Their main argument is that nowadays radical
secularist discourse (that claims to be a discourse of emancipation, democracy
and human rights) is often used as a vehicle of anti-immigrant, Islamophobic
and racist politics. Famous Western feminist like Judith Butler or Rosi
Braidotti point out that this politics instrumentalizes women’s rights and
sexual minorities’ rights in order to legitimize discrimination of Muslim
minorities in Europe as well as military interventions in a Muslim world. As
they do not accept it they are looking for new ways of understanding of women’s
empowerment and agency that will include a sphere of religious experience and
identity. However, their post-secular position is often contrasted with other
feminist positions that remain strongly secularist and Islamophobic. During the
seminar we will draw a map of different feminist positions toward religion in
general and Islam in particular and will discuss various attempts at
reconciling religious identities with the idea of women’s empowerment and
agency (including the phenomenon of Islamic feminism).
