Renegotiations of Religiosity/secularity: Challenging Boundaries Between Religious and Secular Knowledge(s) and Practice(s)

Since the late 1990s, the claims against what the religious right criticise as "gender ideology", namely, the advocacy for gender equality and LGBTIQ* rights, have come to receive an increasing popularity across the globe. For instance, in June this year Pope Francis published yet another critical statement that negates gender theory. This challenge of religious establishments to imagined gender ideology is not only directed against struggles for gender and LGBTIQ* rights but also against academic research, and especially against the interdisciplinary field of Gender Studies. Simultaneously, right-wing populist parties continue to gain popularity, pushing an analogous agenda directed against gender equality, same-sex rights, multiculturalism, and gender studies scholarship. This paper will focus on how, and to what effect, right-wing populism and anti-gender mobilization renegotiates the boundary between religiosity/secularity. It will explore the ambivalent, overlapping but also distinct discourses of religious establishments and right-wing populism, drawing on empirical case studies from various contexts to highlight varieties and similarities of ethno-nationalist right-wing discourses on gender and sexuality in seemingly different places such as Sweden and Japan, attend to the diverse positionings of religious actors in these contexts, and discuss whether these dynamics can be interpreted as struggles around knowledge production on a wider scale. Case studies will include: • An analysis of processes of de- and repoliticization in the aftermath of the right-wing populist decision to ban the pride flag and “provocative” art in a Swedish municipality. • An exploration of the rise of right-wing politics in Japan, which advocates Japanese Shinto and how the issue of women’s rights has become the political quandary, drawing on the debates surrounding Japan's military slavery during the Second World War (the 'comfort women'). • A discussion of whether the distortion of gender theory as ideology can be interpreted as a new dispute between religious vs. academic knowledge production.