Female religious activists navigating gender rights and feminisms

Committed to defending and supporting women’s rights and sometimes engaging in initiatives for gender equality within their religious communities, female religious activists often face internal obstacles from conservative groups and external prejudiced assumptions about the incompatibility between religion and gender rights. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Christian and Muslim women active in an interfaith group fighting gender violence, this contribution explores these women’s understandings of gender rights and feminism, and the impact of situated discourses in the public sphere on their discussions of these issues. This intersectional analysis shows how women’s meaning-making activities mobilise and combine symbolic and social boundaries, contributing to redefining the boundaries of feminism, their permeability, and the role of religion therein.