Women’s participation in religious institutions and movements continues to be limited by heteropatriarchal attitudes and cultures. Even in societies where women have made some gains towards equality, women's rights are still contested. This session critically engages with the notion of patriarchy across global contexts. It asks the questions: Have women fully gained equality? How does heteropatriarchy function to limit women's equality and agency? How do gender, race and class intersect with colonialism supported by heteropatriarchy even today? What strategies have women used "then and now" to challenge heteropatriarchal domination? In this session presenters from three different global contexts will engage with these questions. Some of the strategies that presenters propose include decolonising feminism and decolonising memory. Papers interrogate the ways in which intersectionality and predominantly white, male leadership structures perpetuate colonial legacy and how feminism can sometimes be co-opted to further the interests of heteropatriarchy rather than women themselves.
To what extent should heterosexist patriarchy be understood as a Western modern/colonial invention, as opposed to an oppressive system with origins that can be traced prior to Western colonization? This paper addresses this question through an interpretative-comparative account of *Borderlands/La Frontera* (1987) and *Indecent Theology* (2000), in which queer decolonial feminist scholars Gloria Anzaldúa and Marcella Althaus-Reid respond to histories of colonialism in Mesoamerican and Latin American contexts. Each offers a different way of framing the precolonial past: while Anzaldúa roots her mestiza consciousness in suppressed matriarchal and feminist histories, Althaus-Reid’s argument emphasizes the continuity of patriarchy across empires and always-structurally-marginal eruptions of resistance. This paper discusses the value and limitations of these contrasting images of pre-Spanish-colonial life, concluding by offering constructive proposals for a mode of decolonial memory that honors feminist and queer histories without dependence on a particular image of the past.
Intentional intersectional analysis has, until recently, been largely missing from the sociology of religion (Page and Yip 2021). This paper revisits Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) pioneering work on intersectionality as an analytical framework to understand structural oppression, combined with insights gained from critical menstruation studies, to explore how leadership and power in the Sydney Anglican Diocese is embodied, gendered and raced. This paper addresses a simple question, why are there (still) so many white men leading the Sydney Anglican church? I offer a feminist, sociological and intersectional discussion, which is illuminated by life-stories collected from Sydney Anglicans during the course of my PhD fieldwork. I present the overwhelmingly white and male diocesan leadership structure as a colonial legacy. This reading of the gendered and raced colonial legacies which persist in the diocese today can operate as a case study in broader discussions on evangelicalism, and on decolonizing the study of religion.
In my research into male intellectuals who promoted feminist discourse in late Qing dynasty and early Republic of China , I have discovered that they were not primarily motivated by a desire to benefit women. Instead, their focus was on serving larger purposes such as their country, society, culture, and their own interests as male intellectuals. They saw women's emancipation as a means to achieve these larger goals, rather than as an end in itself.
On the other hand, Chinese women who promoted feminism in China after the 1920s were more actively pursuing liberal women's rights. They explored the collective power of women and demonstrated a deep concern for other oppressed women. Notably, three Christian women, Ding Shujing(丁淑静), Wang Liming（王立明）, and Zeng Baosun（曾宝蓀）, made significant contributions to empowering women and advancing feminism in China.