Abstract
This article analyses the production of gendered subjectivities in contemporary cultural representations of women and girls belonging to conservative protestant communities in Northern and Western Europe. We take the recent work of the Finnish and Dutch female novelists Pauliina Rauhala and Franca Treur as our case study. We explore how their novels represent the negotiations of women and girls from conservative protestant faiths and traditions. Approaching the novels as narratives of sense-making, we focus on notions of creativity and imagination, and gendered embodied experiences. Our analysis thus sheds light on contemporary understandings of women in conservative religions in contemporary Northern and Western Europe.
Highlights
This article analyses the production of gendered subjectivities in contemporary cultural representations of women and girls belonging to conservative protestant communities in Northern and Western Europe
This article explores contemporary constructions of gendered subjectivities in cultural representations of women and girls belonging to conservative protestant communities in Northern and Western Europe
Cultural productions can be a platform for conveying narratives that align with dominant representations of people, objects, and events; but they may provide opportunities for telling ‘other’ stories by starting from marginalized voices, bodies, and experiences
Summary
The protestant traditions referred to by the novels are Conservative Laestadianism in Finland and orthodox reformed Protestantism in the Netherlands. In moral and social terms orthodox reformed Christians adopt a gendered and sexualized countercultural position by maintaining the ideal of patriarchal marriage and family life to the exclusion of ideas about the equality of women and LGBTQ people. This position may have been strengthened in the dynamic with a surrounding society and culture (Derks et al 2014) that has increasingly implemented liberal laws and policymaking, and is secularized in its increasing disaffiliation from mainline churches. For Vilja and Katelijne the imagination and the body are some of the crucial sources that inform their negotiation of faith and the traditions of the community
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