Oppression or liberation? Moving beyond binaries in religion and gender studies

Scholarly feminist analyses of the relationship between religion and gender address the ‘oppression- liberation’ dichotomy in various ways, from structural perspectives portraying religious women 2 as individuals who are inevitably subordinated and oppressed by patriarchy ( Jeffreys 2012; Daly 1978) to more agentic approaches insisting that religious women are subjects who exercise some form of agency—also in situations where their behaviour colludes with and reproduces patriarchal norms and gender inequality (Mack 2003; Mahmood 2005; Avishai 2008). Along a continuum from structural to agentic approaches, other scholars argue that religious women can simultaneously inhabit both submissive-pious and liberal-feminist subjectivities ( Jacobsen 2011; Rinaldo 2014; Zion-Waldoks 2015). These latter works demonstrate multiple and intertwined forms of religious women’s agency and complicity that challenge oppositional, categorical understandings of subordination and liberation (Nyhagen & Halsaa 2016). Broadly speaking, structural perspectives focus on how religion as institutional (male) power, authority, resource and discourse imposes, produces and maintains inequalities between women and men. Agentic perspectives, on the other hand, focus on women’s lived experience of religion and religion as embodied, narrated, performed and (co-)constructed by individuals in everyday life.