Women and religious racisms in Inverclyde: feminised intra-Christian sectarianism and gendered Islamophobia
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Date
06/07/2020Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
06/07/2021Author
Lindores, Sara Diane
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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