Kjønn, makt og motmakt

Abstract

This chapter studies an embodied and gendered counter-conduct developed within a minority religious culture, but still in opposition to this culture. The material used is historical and biographical, with small glimpses of the life and work of Othilie Tonning (1865–1931), a prominent Norwegian social reformer, feminist, and Salvation Army officer. Before she went through a religious conversion and joined the Salvation Army, she was a radical freethinker and suffragette, smoked cigars and cut her hair short. After her conversion, she threw away the cigars but kept her hair short for the rest of her life. That was not popular, neither in the Salvation Army nor society in general in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This story is then discussed with theories of gender and religion, especially Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and her rethinking of vulnerability and resistance. Tonning’s counter-conduct, the close-cropped hairstyle, androgynous features, and masculine uniform, disturbs the relationship between the religious and the secular, as it disturbs and changes the interpretation of gender. The normative point is that this disturbance creates open spaces of hope for human inclusion and diversity.