Religion and Broken Solidarities

By no means a comprehensive account of the theoretical and empirical complexity of social, political, cultural, and religious solidarity, we offer these meditations in an attempt to expose sites where the imaginative pathways for transnational and intersectional solidarities get interrupted by secularist, nationalist, semiotic and discursive roadblocks and checkpoints. Such obstacles reveal modernity’s persistent colonization of the political and religious imaginations. While each essay does not tackle the question of modernity directly, modernity is a central background framework for the volume as a whole and as such each essay helps us reimagine how to confront the problems wrought by modernity. The essays combined invite a more capacious account of religious and feminist agency. They also make space for accounts of the religious, political, and ideological constructions in which intersectional solidarity movements mobilize. We show that such sites tell stories not only about ideological and symbolic roadblocks and misfires but also about what could have been but never materialized at the level of crosscutting socio-political movements. We also show how such instances reflect back on our theoretical understanding of religion and modernity. The case studies, each in different ways, expose “religion” as a historically contextualized site of analysis that cannot be extracted from its embodied manifestations. To this extent, we underscore the need to think about religion intersectionally, and to think intersectionally with religion. Each case reveals its own colonial history, exploitative dynamics, and experiences of marginality. Each case also refuses reductive accounts of such experiences.

Our diverse historical and contemporary case studies from Iran and Turkey, Palestine/Israel, the Women’s March of 2017, and the Harlem Renaissance point to the transnationalist critique of racialization and solidarity as pivotal for the analysis of modernity’s political, social, cultural and religious formations, including their intersections and divergences with one another. Of course, the concept of solidarity itself is ethically neutral. It can denote a coalition of violent and White supremacist interests just as much as a coalition of marginal communities seeking to transform their conditions of oppression and marginality. In this volume, however, we are interested in exploring potential intersectional coalitions and networks of solidarity intent on enhancing emancipatory aspirations and social justice objectives. We also underscore that the inability of South-South and intersectional solidarities to form robustly in the North constitute different modernist plotlines. Here are stories of religion and ideology (secularist, theocratic, and multiculturalist) that reveal a persistent feminist suspicion of religious traditions and their clear historical underpinnings in heteropatriarchal norms and institutions.

Given the centrality of an intersectional analysis to this volume, we would be remiss if we did not identify our own positionalities in this introduction’s conclusion. Lupo is a heterosexual, cisgender, White male, who was raised in the United Methodist Church, but is no longer practicing. Omer is an Ashkenazi cisgender Israeli Jewish scholar working in an American Catholic university. Both authors write with an ethical and political commitment to human rights-oriented forms of solidarity and resistance to matrices of oppression. They both aim to do so in a way that takes critical genealogical approaches to the study of religion as necessary but not sufficient for such reimagining. As Gürel points out in her contribution, a focus on broken solidarities is not particularly novel within feminist scholarship, which has long challenged vague, paternalistic, and universalizing appeals to “sisterhood” as a foundation of solidarity across borders and identity boundaries. This scholarly intervention underpins Third World and African-American intersectional interventions that expose and reject abstract claims to universal women’s experiences that ignore or myopically conceal their colonial subjectivity, racialized bodies, and class marginality. To this important intervention, we add a focus on nationalist discourses, including various manifestations of secularist political formations as well as semiotic underpinnings such as the operation of antisemitism, Israel, and Palestine in international and transnational channels of solidarity. By bringing these distinct yet interrelated case studies of unimaginable, fragmentary, ephemeral, and unrealized forms of solidarity into conversation, our hope is to not only reveal the critical possibilities that show themselves when we think nation, race, and gender together, but also the emancipatory possibilities that might be imagined beyond them.