Religion, Sexuality, Gender

The boundaries between the religious and the secular are constantly negotiated and renegotiated within modernity. Perhaps nowhere is this process of negotiation more acute than in relation to conceptions of gender and sexuality across diverse cultural contexts.

The researchers associated with this theme investigate the ways that issues concerning gender and sexuality become a flashpoint for the establishment of the religious/secular divide. However, we also investigate how these polarized enactments of this divide relate to everyday understandings of religion and sexuality, which often crosscut the divisions visible at the level of public debates. We examine how both religion and secularism play a significant role in how gendered difference and sexual identities are formulated and enacted.

Project (funded by NWO): Sexuality, Religion and Secularism: Cultural encounters in the African Diaspora in the Netherlands

Researchers and fellow associated to this research theme: Dr Brenda Bartelink, Dr Kim Knibbe and Dr Jelle Wiering