Introduction

Over the last three decades, as religious practices and belongings have gained increased visibility on a global scale, the concept of secularity, as well as the relationship between secularity and religion, has become an object of intense interdisciplinary and inter- national debate. This debate has been dubbed the “postsecular turn” (Rosi Braidotti) in the interdisciplinary field of gender research. Both concepts, religiosity and secularity, are highly gendered, and each forms a specific context of knowledge production. This volume brings together these concepts for the first time. In pop culture, for instance, images and icons draw on the cultural memory of the religious and the secular to create new meanings, and in academia, studies are being carried out that focus on the co-constitutive nature of secularity and religiosity instead of their consecutive order. This introduction provides an overview of both different streams of the debate and the chapters in this volume.
Keywords: postsecular feminism, feminist activism, knowledge, secularism, religion, pop culture, visual culture, gender studies