Women and religious racisms in Inverclyde: feminised intra-Christian sectarianism and gendered Islamophobia

Abstract

This thesis re-problematises the issue of intra-Christian sectarianism from the standpoints of women from different denominational backgrounds, social classes and age groups. It foregrounds alternative gendered knowledge, situated within private and familial spheres, to provide a less partial picture of sectarianism which has traditionally been associated with male-dominated concerns such as Scottish football. It reveals processes of feminised intra-Christian sectarianism, which construct Catholic women and girls as racialised outsiders in ways that are simultaneously gendered and classed. A new definition of feminised sectarianism is proposed with a view to enabling future research and practice to tackle this issue, in ways that are better attuned to the gendered sectarianisation of boundaries. The empirical data are based on nine months of community fieldwork in Inverlcyde, from across eighteen biographical narrative and semi-structured interviews, to research issues of religious difference through the lens of different women’s everyday lives. It employs narrative analysis and a feminist intersectional approach to answer the following research questions: what are the boundaries of ethnic and religious belonging in Scotland? How are these boundaries transmitted? How do women think, act and feel about religious difference? And are there negative judgements of the ‘other’ or a ranking of one’s own gendered cultural and religious norms and values as superior? Overall, it argues that the continual expression and validation of the ethnic and religious boundaries of belonging operate across three connected levels. Firstly, rhetorically, at the level of ideas, drawing selectively on historical scripts and contemporary discourses to reproduce identity narratives in everyday life on which ethnic and religious differences can be continually (re)built. Secondly, overtly, through mobilising visible signs and signals such as the institutional markers of separate denominational schools or the Orange Order to provide legitimacy for these historical ideas about religious difference. And, thirdly, covertly, through invoking subjective beliefs about basic value orientations such as perceived differences in gendered cultural and religious norms to (re)produce, create and maintain ethnic and religious boundaries in more subtle ways. Focusing on these different levels at which the boundary appears to be maintained emphasises the subjective, discursive, ideational and attitudinal processes that reproduce religious differences not on the sum of overt markers of difference. In other words, it sheds light on how groups categorise themselves - on how issues such as sectarianism are reproduced inter-generationally - by shifting the focus to the various social processes of inclusion and exclusion that appear to enable discrete ethnic and religious categories and dichotomies to be maintained over time. Finally, a conscious decision to use the broader language of ‘religious difference’ rather than the term ‘sectarianism’ also revealed participants’ emotional reactions to the presence of ‘new’ Muslim ‘outsiders’. This is likely because interviews took place in the run up to the EU Referendum, a time of heightened social and political tension over issues of immigration. Therefore, analysing Catholic women’s experiences of sectarianism revealed many similarities between their own experiences and the processes that they themselves also used to racialise Muslim women as the ‘new’ outsiders to the nation. As such, this thesis makes a timely and contemporary contribution to existing research in the field. It argues that like all religious racisms, feminised intra-Christian sectarianism in Scotland operates on a contingent intersectional hierarchy of belonging. This hierarchy is imagined relative to a ‘superior’ white, masculine, middle-class, Protestant subjectivity. The number of children that women from ethnic and religious minorities have, their relationships with men, and their sexuality more broadly, can be politicised by others in ways that racialise on account of the overlapping characteristics of social class, gender and perceived religious identity. Gendered and classed respectability politics can thus be mobilised against minority women and girls in ways that racialise the boundaries of belonging. Entrenched patriarchal values and gendered cultural and religious norms help to sustain these different modalities of racism, precisely because the boundary of the ethnic is often deeply reliant on gender