What Space for Female Subjectivity in the Post-Secular?

Introduction

We live in times when the religious has claimed center stage in radically different ways in society than hitherto. The bourgeoning academic debate on post-secularism in feminist studies is one instance of this. It is almost exactly a decade since Rosi Braidotti (2008) wrote her influential intervention on the need for feminism and feminist theory to engage substantively with the post-secular. Her intervention has also been a seminal contribution to the reappraisal of conventional feminist theorizations of and perspectives on religion. This paper is meant both as a rejoinder and as a modest contribution to her call. Moreover, like Smiet (2015), we see a continuity in academic theorizations and debates of religion, secularism and gender as a masculine sphere, even so in post-secular debates, theories and perspectives. Smiet interrogates the post/secular truths from intersectional perspectives, by marshalling the life and struggles of Sojourner Truth as an inspirational figure to religious feminists.

The major argument of this paper is that the post-secular debate fails to address the role and place of female agency and subjectivity in the post-secular. Secondly, we conceptualize female pilgrimages as a third space, transcending secular and religious understandings of female agency and subjectivity. We find the notion of third space apposite in theorizing the ambivalences and transgressions of post-secular pilgrimages, as well as the new spaces actuated by female pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela.

The core question actualized by the post-secular turn is to what extent is religion antithetical to feminist liberation? The dominant, secularist, template for studying the relationship between women and religion equates the modern and the secular with gender equality and sexual liberation. In contrast, the traditional and the religious have been equated with female oppression, patriarchy and hierarchy (Spivak, 1999; Giorgi, 2016). The first dyad is predominantly theorized as a space of affirmation, female subjectivity, agency and autonomy, whereas the second dyad is primarily conceived as a space of negativity, antithetical to female subjectivity, agency and autonomy (Mahmood, 2005; Braidotti, 2008; Bracke, 2008; Reilly, 2011; Aune, 2015; Berg and Lundahl, 2016).

A prominent feminist scholar that problematizes this dyad is Joan W. Scott (2009). She deployed the propitious slip-up neologism, sexularism, to call into question the simplistic equivalences drawn between modernity, secularism, gender equality and sexual liberation, on the one hand, and tradition, religion, patriarchy, hierarchy and oppression, on the other. Unlike the sharp oppositions drawn between secularism and gender equality versus religion and oppression of women, Scott rather wants to draw attention to their common ground, namely, the subordinate position of women. However, Scott’s sexularism relates exclusively to modernity and the secular and does not address the post-secular debate. Our intention in using the term post-sexularism is not to provide substantive conceptual discussions and genealogies. Rather, we deploy the notion of post-sexularism to draw attention to the enduring affinities and continuities between secularism and sexism, on the one hand, and post-secularism and sexism, on the other.

The post-secular turn in feminism calls for a fundamental rethinking and a re-conceptualization of religion, gender and the secular in feminist theory, beyond conventional theorizations of religion as a space for the (re)-production of masculine power, of the public and the private spheres, as well as the Enlightenment and secular underpinnings of western feminism. By proposing the notion of post-sexularism we hope to alert the budding feminist engagements with the post-secular to also critically engage with the normative assumptions of the post-secular debate regarding the reassertion, visibility, and re-colonization of public space by religion (see Graham, 2018). This paper heeds the invitation, and examines articulations of feminist subjectivity, agency and autonomy in a post-secular context.

As noted by Mahmood (2009), secularism is not so much the separation of state and religion as the re-articulation of the religious in the secular in ways that are ‘commensurate with modern rationalities and sensibilities’. A key aspect of the post-secular debate is, thus, the notion of the secular state itself. There is a need for historically grounded analyses that problematize the assumed conflict between the secular and the religious. On the contrary, the secular, the modern and the religious co-habited spaces of non-conflictual relations. We should also bear in mind that the separation of state and religion did not diminish the power of the church since religion permeates everyday life, family law, morality and ethics. Daily life and conduct were, in many parts of the world, very much informed by religious teaching and doctrines (see Reilly, 2011; Hawthorne, 2013a).

The present article takes issue with the masculine perspectives that dominate the post-secular debate. It thereby aligns itself with the budding critical feminist studies of post-secularism. We argue that, in general, both the protagonists and the detractors of post-secularism fail to recognize feminist theorizations of religion, the post-secular debate in feminist studies, and the place and role of women in the coming of the post-secular. Beyond an intervention in this debate, the present article is a theory-informed analytical study of articulations of female subjectivity, agency and autonomy in a pilgrimage context.

The empirical material we draw upon for this study consists of interviews with 28 women, ranging in age from 19 to 69, who conducted pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The interviews took place on and off-season with pilgrims during 2011, 2012 and 2014. Biographic narrative interpretive method (BNIM) was used in order to collect rich and nuanced data crucial in capturing female subjectivity, agency and autonomy in a pilgrimage context. BNIM has been used in life narrative studies (Wenngraf, 2001), in our case pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Narratives enable nuanced insights into that which individuals cherish and value most and, as such, are apposite for collecting data on intimate issues of the formations of self, identity and agency (Nilsson, 2016; Pernecky, 2010; Andriotis, 2009). The interviews were conducted in situ and permission was secured to use the respondents’ narratives un-anonymized. BNIM is not a participant observation study, rather a conventional ‘objective’ outsider approach.

The present article has six sections, the introduction included. In section two, we provide a brief overview of feminist research on gender, religion and the secular with a focus on the major theoretical and analytical issues as well as debates therein. The previous section provides the context for our excursus on the post-secular turn and the key issues raised in that debate in section three. The fourth section discusses the budding post-secular turn and debate in feminism. This prepares the ground for exploring female subjectivity, agency and autonomy, by deploying the concepts of orientation (spatial and affective) and intentionality to analyze the empirical material in section five. In the concluding section, we recapitulate our findings and point to several open issues at the intersections of feminist studies and the post-secular.

Gender and Religion

As Joan Scott (2009: 1) famously averred, ‘the equal status of women and men was not a primary concern for those who moved to separate church and state’. Neither, we argue, has the equal status of women been a major concern in the much-debated ‘return of religion’ for that matter. In her substantive review of studies of gender, religion and political agency, Giorgi (2016) deconstructs, among other things, ‘the necessary relationship’ between secularization, Europe and gender equality – as noted by, among others, Mahmood (2005), Scott (2007), and Braidotti (2008), one major theoretical and analytical consequence of the intellectual debt of western (liberal) feminist conceptions of freedom and equality as quintessentially secular. A second and related implication of this is that normative, modernist and hegemonic accounts of female subjectivity, agency and autonomy became the primary lens of understanding female liberation, gender equality and the dialectics of gender and religion. Like Scott (2007) before her, Giorgi points to the emergence of unprecedented alliances between feminism and conservative anti-Muslim positions.

From her review of the (feminist) studies of gender and secularism, Giorgi identifies four key elements. First, as witnessed by feminist theologies and religious feminism, there is no necessary relationship between struggles for women’s rights and processes of secularization. The secular is not the only space for the articulations of struggles for female emancipation. Secondly, this implies the corollary point that there are several forms of agency within as well as outside of the religious. Thirdly, heeding Scott (2009), Giorgi points out that the secular is no guarantee for women’s rights and self-determinations. Lastly, she calls for ‘analyses based on practices of identity (gender, sexual, religious/secular)’, instead of starting from the categories of secular and secularization, in studying the role of religion in contemporary societies (2016: 9).

Feminist studies of religion have predominantly equated religion with the suppression of female subjectivity, agency and autonomy as well as gender violence. A second implication of the Enlightenment pedigrees of feminist scholarship and secularist conceptions of gender and religion has been that western notions of female subjectivity, agency and autonomy are made normative in benchmarking gender equality, female liberation and progress globally as well (Mohanty, 1984, 1991; Spivak, 1999; Mahmood, 2005). Hawthorne (2013b) notes the absence of sustained discussion in the sub-field of religion and gender in religious studies and theology regarding the challenges posed by post-colonial perspectives that question the privileged position accorded to gender as the primary site and origo of critique. A major implication is the comforting sense of being marginally implicated in colonial knowledge formation, risking reproducing the ‘imperialist figurations found elsewhere in the academic study of religions’ (p. 168). She proposes the figure of catachresis, as theorized by Spivak (1999), ‘as a potential step towards displacing European concept-metaphors and value-codings’ that are central in establishing ‘normative epistemic subjectivity’ (p. 168).

Hawthorne (2013b) signals to the paradox of religion as a bearer of Enlightenment master narratives of rationality and light. A politics of the secular state should thus take into account not only Enlightenment discourse but also the dialectics of the secular and sacred that shape modern power. At the same time, secular feminism has upheld modernity and the secular as the spaces of female empowerment (see also Reilly, 2011; Van den Brandt, 2014). This alerts us to a basic feature of female subjectivity, agency and autonomy in the context of female pilgrimages, namely that these are phenomena of the West, which in itself is a corollary to conceptions of the return of religion in secular, modern spaces. Although our primary concern in this article is with questions of gender, religion and female subjectivity, it has to be noted that post-colonial critique also questions the exclusive claims to modernity and secularity in the western discourses of civilization (Chakrabarty, 2000; Mignolo and Escobar, 2013). Seitz (2014) notes that the critique of secularism also questioned dominant imaginaries of the West as ‘culturally and theologically neutral’.

Paradoxically enough, western secular feminist conceptions of religion and gender thereby replicate western masculine views of subjectivity, agency and autonomy as well as equality and freedom. Post-colonial feminists have been critical of the dichotomous conceptions of the religious and the secular, and have alerted us to the complicity of western secularist feminist elisions with colonial imaginaries. In doing so, post-colonial (feminist) theory and critique has also shed light onto the manifold ways in which the religious interplays with gender. As indicated by Terman (2016), among others, this new orientalism ‘is being used once again by western imperial powers to justify their geopolitical domination by posing as the liberator of Muslim women from native patriarchal cultures and religions’ (see also Mahmood, 2008). Beyond the theoretical works that examine secularism as a political project, questions of agency and norms as well as the interplays between feminist/queer advocacy and imperial geopolitics, Terman (2016) identifies the role of feminist NGOs, and even science fiction, as further examples of the articulations of new orientalism as well.

The previous gestures to the problematics (theoretical and analytical) associated with the tethering of (feminist) studies of religion to the private-public divide, the sacred-profane divide and iso-mappings of the secular with female subjectivity, agency and autonomy. As noted by Vasilaki, the ‘contemporary theoretical interest in religion evidences a dissatisfaction with existing feminist approaches to the question of agency, for which the notion of autonomy is crucial, as is resistance to forms of heteronomy, such as religion’ (2016: 105). We will return to this issue in section four below. However, we have to make a digression into the post-secular turn, the better to lay the ground for the post-secular turn in feminism.

The Post-Secular Turn

The secularization of modernity has been the dominant perspective in social studies for a long time. As noted by Martin (1978), the secularization thesis departs from the assumption of a uniform and unilinear process shaping modernity and thus fails to attend to the differential articulations of the secular. In addition to questioning the death of religion, the reappraisal has also led to the insight that religion has always been a part of modernity and that religion is no longer in the periphery of social life (Taylor, 2007; Butler et al., 2011; Berger, 2017). In sum, the secularization thesis has come under increasing critique and the ‘reappraisal of the assumptions of classic secularization theory’ (Graham, 2018: 2). Religion is, in fact, no longer in the corner where secularism placed it. Wilson and Steger (2013), and Tse (2014), read contemporary resurgence in religiosity as expressions of and responses to shifting global realities in the 21st century. One indication of the resurgence of religion in the public sphere is the plethora of academic concepts and designations put forward over the past three decades to capture current expressions of religion in the West. New Age, spiritualism, neo-secular, post-secular, re-sacralization, de-secularization, re-enchantment of the West, return of religion, re-privatization of religion, to mention some, have figured to designate the contemporary. Della Dora has suggested ‘infrasecular’ as an umbrella concept to denote processes of de- and re-sacralization (2016: 1). Beyond an intimation of the manifold and palpable ways in which religion manifests itself in everyday life, figures in our consciousness and shapes our understanding of the contemporary, the plethora of designations also indicate the struggles over the naming, delimitation and appropriation of the present. As Bourdieu reminds us, naming represents a key aspect of the power to ‘impose the legitimate definition of the divisions of the social world, an exercise of power (symbolic and material)’ (1992: 221), of ways of being and relating to the world, i.e. ‘the act of naming helps to establish the structure of this world’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 105).

However, it appears that a consensus has emerged in the sense that, more often than not, the post-secular is the umbrella concept used in academic debate to designate contemporary reconfigurations of the public sphere under the sign of the religious: the fact that Habermas (2008), one of the most prominent thinkers and public intellectuals engaged in the post-secular debate, may also have contributed to its popularity. Thus, one speaks of the post-secular turn. There are several cartographies of the post-secular that provide typologies based on a variety of criteria, ranging from chronological to epistemological and theological attributes (see, for example, Schewel, 2014). Moreover, the concept of the post-secular has generated ‘fractious debate’ and is a ‘divided field’ (Fordahl, 2017: 550). Indeed, to Martin, ‘the post-secular is simply surreptitious effort to craft an imagined secular past’ (1978: 560). For our purposes, we rely on Beckford’s (2012) typology of the post-secular as elaborated further by Molendijk (2015). The latter provides an exhaustive review of various currents in the post-secular turn, and identifies at least six ways in which the post-secular has been theorized in academia.

First, the post-secular is identified as a shorthand for the re-enchantment of art, literature and film in particular works that have ‘a religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real’ (McClure, 2007: 3, cited in Molendijk, 2015: 102). The second sense is the post-secular as the resurgence of religion, in conjunction with the growing importance of faith-based organizations as providers of welfare in the wake of the restructuring of the welfare state in the West. Coupled with globalization processes, we observe renegotiations and redefinitions, as well as the blurring of boundaries of the secular and the religious, private and public. The work of Beaumont and Cloke (2012) is representative of this take on the post-secular. And we might as well include the study by Wilson and Steger (2013), who frame the post-secular within a context marked by mounting global crises, changing global realities and the crises of secular rationalism in the 21st century. The post-secular is part of what they denote as ‘religious globalisms’ that emerge in the wake of neoliberalism and economic rationalism and offer alternative responses to global injustices and financial crises.

The third sense of the post-secular points to the spaces of affirmation, autonomy and subjectivity that exist in religious spaces, a re-sacralization that attends to the importance of modern (secular) values such as freedom, diversity and choice. Liberal and individualist conceptions of secular agency as the sole domains of autonomy are, thus, questioned and problematized. The religious scholar Knott (2010) and the feminist philosopher Braidotti (2008) are prominent representatives of this strand. The fourth major cluster is associated primarily with the work of Habermas and one that set the agenda for the debates of the post-secular in sociology, philosophy, political theory and theology (Molendijk, 2015: 104). The detractors of the post-secular question, among other things, whether we are indeed living in a post-secular age, the Eurocentric assumptions that underlie the post-secular and its normative (universalizing) claims as well as explanatory potential (Bader, 2012; Gorski et al., 2012; Beckford, 2012; McGhee, 2013).

Sceptics that question things post-secular comprise the fifth category and claim that the post-secular thesis has neither empirical nor historical data to buttress its claims. Beckford (2012) asserts that the post-secular is nothing more than an academic construct. Molendijk (2015) includes radical orthodoxy as a sixth category of which Milbank (1990) and Blond (1998) are the major proponents. Radical orthodoxy maintains that the secular is but a species of the sacred rather than something distinct or apart. Indeed, Milbank (1990: 3) contends that the secular ‘is actually constituted in its secularity by “heresy” in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more “neo-pagan” than simply anti-religious’. Or, as Schmitt (1996: 42) famously contended, ‘all significant concepts of the theory of the modern state are secularized theological concepts’. Hence, modernity’s self-image as secular, as irreligious and hence the ‘other’ of traditional society is not tenable.

One could say that radical orthodoxy is at home with Nietzsche (1989 [1887]) in its claim that the secular is actually borne by the theological. In his account of the genealogies of religion, Mendieta (2009) emphatically states ‘how we never became secular’ to drive home the same point. To the cynic, the secular is but a species of the sacred – God may have been declared dead (although, like Mark Twain, God may have as well retorted: ‘rumours of my death are highly exaggerated’). Man has sat himself on the secular throne, leaving the patriarchal order intact. In any case, the coming of modernity revoked the prerogatives of the church as sole interpreter of heavenly and worldly matters (Eliade, 1959; Eade and Sallnow, 1991; Tillich, 2011). Secularism has become the new religion (e.g. Horkheimer and Adorno, 2001). McLellan’s (2010: 3) take on the post-secular casts off social and cultural theory as one that is ‘intra-secular’ rather than ‘anti-secular in character’, reminding us of the secular genealogies of post-secularism.

It is noteworthy that both the protagonists and the detractors of post-secularism fail to give due recognition to 1) feminist perspectives on religion, feminist theorizations, debates and critiques of the post-secular, and 2) the place and role of women in the post-secular. Typologies of the post-secular fail to include the gendered dimension of the post-secular as a relevant category in its own right. A benign interpretation of this would be that it is only recently that a burgeoning engagement with the post-secular by feminist scholars has been observed. A critical reading, on the other hand, would be that this is not surprising, given that the post-secular turn has been a predominantly manly affair. Like the secular before it, we argue, conceptions of the post-secular marginalize women from the religious sphere and as such inherit the secularist, masculine and colonial attributes of modernity. In other words, there are abiding continuities between conceptions of the secular and the post-secular, hence our post-sexularism. Our critique is not as harsh as it may appear at first, since feminist scholars of religion as well as theology have pointed out that ‘critical accounts of religious feminism share a common assumption with accounts of feminist history that exclude religion: both approaches view religion and feminism as inherently incompatible, as opposing forces in modern culture’ (Braude, 2004: 557). We therefore submit the following thesis (that we develop more in section five): dominant western feminist conceptions of religion spill onto conceptions of the post-secular as a space that forecloses female subjectivity, agency and autonomy. The former has, perhaps, also to do with the misgivings about the post-secular turn as being an aspect of the wider anti-feminist, religious and fundamentalist backlash. There are reasons for feminist studies of religion in particular and the contemporary in general to engage with the post-secular turn and manifestations of religion in the public sphere.

The Post-Secular Debate and Feminism: An Excursus

As noted by Van den Brandt (2014: 35), ‘ideologies and politics of humanism and secularism in Western Europe historically have a tensioned relationship with religion as well as with feminism and the women’s movement’. The post-secular debate and turn in feminism may have opened up a meeting ground for unpacking and ‘reconciling’ the uneasy tensions between gender, religion, and secular humanism. According to Reilly (2011), one can trace the renewed critical engagement with religion by feminist scholars to second wave feminism of the late 1960s through the 70s. That said, western (liberal) feminist thought is intellectually indebted to the Enlightenment and, as such, is a bearer of secularist conceptions of the religious sphere. One of the first feminist scholars who engaged with the post-secular turn and explored its theoretical and analytical implications for feminism is Rosi Braidotti. In her article ‘In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism’ in Theory, Culture & Society from 2008, which can rightfully be seen as the opening salvo of the post-secular debate in feminism, she discerned not only a budding post-secular turn in feminism, but also a turn that challenges European feminism in major ways. Her call is germane on several theoretical and analytical grounds. Braidotti’s intervention is one of the few exceptions in this regard. She questions the dismissive attitude of feminist theory to matters religious. She challenges us to engage with the post-secular as an affirmation of feminist agency and oppositional space. Braidotti questions the secular in feminism theory as well as the colonial and racial underpinnings of European humanism and the Enlightenment project.

Firstly, she breaks with a cherished feminist tradition that conceived the religious sphere solely as a space of negativity for female agency and autonomy. Secondly, her intervention is a timely reminder to feminist studies to take questions of religion in general to ‘heart’, i.e. to leave behind dominant feminist conceptions that equate secularism with gender equality, female agency and autonomy, and conversely equates religion and relegates the religious sphere to the spaces of negativity and patriarchy. Thirdly, Braidotti takes heed of contemporary reconfigurations of politics, economics, culture and society in the wake of ‘the return of religion’ in the West and proposes feminist engagements with the post-secular. Fourthly, she draws attention to the challenges posed by articulations of the religious that open up spaces of female agency, among other things by reference to the work of Mahmood (2005) on religious piety.

Implicitly, Braidotti questions also the Eurocentric underpinnings of feminist studies of religion. She calls for re-conceptualizations of political subjectivity or agency, beyond conventional theorizations of (feminist) subjectivities that hinge on the production of radical counter-subjectivities: subjectivities not conditioned simply by negation but rather by ‘creative affirmation, not on loss but on vital generative forces’ (Braidotti, 2008: 19). The implication being that ‘existence, ethics and politics are not indexed on negativity and hence on the horizon of alterity and melancholia’ (p. 19). To her this is the very essence of post-secular subjectivity, one based on an ‘ethics of becoming’ and a search for ‘new creative alternatives and sustainable futures’ (p. 19). Although she is neither the first nor presumably the last to question cherished feminist ‘truths’ on the relationship between religion, secularism and feminism, she undoubtedly is the first to explicitly draw attention to feminist engagement with the post-secular. Beyond a challenge to European feminism, the post-secular turn also questions cherished liberal assumption of subjectivity, resistance and freedom. In this sense, one could say that Braidotti goes against the grain of hegemonic feminist theories and perspectives on matters religious in the past two centuries.

According to Vasilaki (2016), Braidotti also provides a new methodology and role for critical social theory, one that offers strategies of affirmation. In the same issue of the journal, Sarah Bracke has a contribution that explores the relation between modernity and religion. Like Braidotti, Bracke delves into the implications of the ‘new disarticulation’ for questions of religious agency, subjectivities and autonomy. She shows that the modern can also be incorporated in and produced from faith-centered perspectives, and therefore argues for reconsiderations of hegemonic conceptualizations that place religion at the margins of modernity and secularism. Bracke proposes instead that one consider the ‘post-secular’ as a ‘new disarticulation between the modern and the secular’ (2008: 51).

Since the 2010s, we have seen a flurry of feminist research on the post-secular turn. In what follows we provide a brief overview of research into the post-secular by feminist scholars. We discern at least three influences that have contributed to the burgeoning interest by feminist scholars into matters post-secular. As noted before, this development has partly been spurred by post-colonial feminist studies of religion that deconstruct western conceptions of female subjectivity, agency and autonomy as exclusively secular and the product of modernity and liberalism. Secondly, religion has become one of the key templates of geo-politics in our times. Moreover, this has to do with palpable and widespread articulations of religion in the spheres of culture, politics and economy, at different geographical scales. An expression of this is the transformation of the urban social and cultural landscape of western societies due to migration, the growth of non-Christian religious denominations, as well as questions of gender/ethnicity, religion, body politics and the veil (Scott, 2007; Berg and Lundahl, 2016). Thirdly, to judge from the citations of Braidotti’s article in feminist studies of the post-secular, one should acknowledge the significance of Braidotti’s timely and critical intervention for the surge in feminist scholarship on the post-secular. Although Mahmood and Butler are included in several accounts of the post-secular turn in feminism (see for example Braidotti, 2008; Dickinson and Morgan, 2015; Vasilaki, 2016; Berg and Lundahl, 2016), neither Mahmood nor Butler have explicitly engaged with the post-secular as such.

However, their critique of secular feminist studies of religion has been significant for the bourgeoning post-secular debate in feminist studies. For example, Vasilaki’s (2016) critical review of the post-secular turn in feminism centers on Butler, Braidotti and Mahmood. She reads their substantial engagement with religion, which is markedly different from traditional feminist standpoints on religion as a sphere that denies the feminine, which to Vasilaki is symptomatic of the post-secular moment in feminism. While recognizing the limitations of Eurocentric theorizations of agency, post-secular feminist critique of secularist conceptions of subjectivity and autonomy, Vasilaki is keen on exploring the politics that the post-secular turn in feminism authorizes. Vasilaki finds the decoupling of autonomy from subjectivity highly problematic, not least since this would entail political disengagement and thereby risk neutralizing critical social theory. She is skeptical to what extent the potential of new forms of religious subjectivities that Braidotti discusses can be translated into post-secular power and lead to progressive and meaningful social change (Vasilaki, 2016). Still, it is unclear what Vasilaki means with regard to post-secular power. Scholars in the post-colonial tradition (Said, 1983; Robbins, 2013) have criticized the equation of the secular, the modern and the state, a key implication of which is that the post-secular turn in feminism has to negotiate and deal with the risks associated with how to name and debate violence against women in a post-colonial context, without falling into the trap of a new orientalism (Terman, 2016).

Post-secular feminist scholars urge us to go beyond the conventional feminist view of religion as an adversary and thereby invite us to be attentive to the spaces of feminist subjectivity, agency and autonomy in religion. In short, religion as a space of affirmation.

Post-Secular Female Pilgrimages

In what follows, the article provides illustrations of post-secular female subjectivities, agency and autonomy based on a case study of female pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela, with focus on Il Camino, understanding of the secular and the sacred, conceptions of self and other, as well as one’s place in the world. Our concern here is with practices and beliefs that underlie female subjectivity, agency and autonomy that fail to be packaged within institutionally governed religious narratives, as the measure of individual religiosity (McGuire, 2016). We prefer to designate the female pilgrims as post-secular and not spiritual, since they choose to journey to established pilgrimage destinations. In contrast, spirituality need not be tied to a religious quest. Following Ahmed (2006), we conceive orientations as bodily and spatial. She identifies three ways in which orientations shape our relations to the world. Namely, how we inhabit the world, how we perceive the world we share with others, how and where we align our energy and attention towards the world.

From the interviews with 28 female pilgrims in situ, we have culled three main features of post-secular female pilgrimage orientations, which separately and jointly illustrate multiple articulations of feminist subjectivity, agency and autonomy. It transpires from the narratives of our respondents that most of them are well travelled, i.e. endowed with cosmopolitan mobile capital. However, none of our respondents explicitly stated that they were practicing believers or that they belonged to a religious denomination. In the wake of Paolo Coelho’s novel The Pilgrim, the documentary and the movie The Way, Il Camino emerged as ‘a must’ for cosmopolitan travelers to incorporate in their mobility portfolio (Nilsson, 2016; Salazar and Schiller, 2016). Doing the Il Camino constitutes a way of realizing the self, and an opportunity to find answers to personal and existential issues. For the post-secular female pilgrims, doing the Il Camino is an expression of autonomous mobilities that are neither secular nor sacred. The latter is one of many ways in which expressions of female subjectivities revolve around actively carving out spaces (rooms) of one’s own. We denote these as the spatial orientation of post-secular female pilgrimage, specifically regarding self, ways of being, intentionality and affirmation. Moreover, these orientations are lived, embodied experiences. One of our respondents spoke for many when she referred to the pilgrimage experience as ‘struggling with yourself and struggling with your body. A concentration on the most important things’. She was, in other words, describing the act of body/self-affirmation, inhabiting space and time, i.e. constituting the world.

The journey for post-secular female pilgrims is an opportunity to reconfigure the self, identity and thereby a space of autonomy for the articulation of female subjectivities and agency that transcend profane and sacral ways of being. In and through the journey, post-secular female pilgrims affirm mobile agency by appropriating the famous trail to their own specific ends: ‘for the first time in my life I can do a journey without fear and with strength’, as one respondent put it. Another female pilgrim saw the trail as a transformational space, one that opens-up for the actuation of new ways of being: ‘every single night I just slept where I wanted to sleep and normally I am a very organized person but this time I decided to sleep when and where I want to, eat where I want and when I want and do whatever I want to’. In the narratives of our respondents, the journey/pilgrimage emerges as a positively loaded experiential space, one in which new ways of being are formed, new existential principles are established (Nilsson and Tesfahuney, 2016). Il Camino becomes a space that female, post-secular pilgrims orientate in their own terms. The orientations are not solely embodied and spatial but narrative inter-corporeal practices as well. Our respondents provide several examples of female bonding. Sitting, gathered together in a ring or around a bonfire in the evening and sharing their experiences and innermost feelings to strangers, an expression of emotional spatiality or what Reckwitz (2012: 254) denotes affective spaces, spaces that contain perceptive-affective relations, spaces in which we are emotionally in touch – open to the world and its affect on us (Simonsen, 2012).

The second feature of post-secular female pilgrimages is an instance of orientation as an opening towards the world and expressed in many of the pilgrim narratives. One respondent evoked this sentiment when she stated that ‘it’s like a communal feeling, doing the same’. In this sense, post-secular female pilgrimages articulate experiential spaces that are transitive, shared and sensuous. ‘I’m privileged to have met so many friendly, warm people’, as one of our respondents expressed it. Another respondent shared what she felt by saying that ‘it’s lovely to listen to their personal stories, because at night we gathered people to us together’. One instance of this is the respondent for whom the journey actuated agency, in the sense that she reached closure concerning difficult familial matters. Perhaps her sense of relief is intimated in the following statement: ‘I started thinking of my life. I thought a lot about my sons and me, about my daughter and my business. I was able to come to a decision along the way’. Il Camino in a sense gave her the ‘right’ orientation. As noted previously, post-secular female pilgrimages actuate a third space, neither secular nor sacral, and post-secular female pilgrims reconfigure the sacred space of Santiago de Compostela, re-orient and make sense of the place in ways that go beyond institutionalized place-identity and meaning. Third space is the space of ambivalence, of the in-between, and transcends normative categories, identities and practices. Moreover, to Bhabha (1994), third space is ‘productive, and not merely reflective, space that engenders new possibility’ (Meredith, 1998: 3). Third space is transgressive, dissonant and a space where new forms of subjectivity, agency and autonomy are articulated – a space that enables counter-subjectivities. In short, third space is open. We find the notion of third space appropriate in the context of our study as it captures the ambivalences, transgressions, and the new spaces that are opened up in and through post-secular female pilgrimages.

To one of our respondent, a sacred place is ‘where I can be alone; it doesn’t have to be in a church but alone with God. Alone with myself alone with God where I can pray’. Post-secular female pilgrimages appear to accept the ethos of ‘thrownness’, being thrown into the world (Heidegger, 2010), to live and experience the world as it unfolds, an expression of their quest for answers to personal and existential questions. One of the respondents evoked this sense of thrownness when she noted ‘living in the moment’, and that she had ‘always been planning and sorted out things well ahead’. This is an ethos that is not teleological, nor governed by rationalist attitudes of linear time and the future: an ethos of in-between, outside of the sacred and the secular.

The third attribute of post-secular female pilgrimages relates to the phenomenological notion of intentionality, which denotes that our consciousness of the world is always already relational, such that it is directed towards something and signals reaching out to the world (Searle, 1983). Several of our respondents spoke of the significance of meeting the other, being open to the world and engaging with it in immersive ways. One of our respondents best captured this when she stated ‘and then I met a girl I had met before in Burgos, it was the best moment at the Camino. It was like coming home from a very long journey. So I was in a totally new place, with strangers, but meeting this person again was like coming back home, a very special experience’. This sentiment was expressed concisely by another respondent recalling how ‘they asked if I wanted to join them. I said it would be lovely’. Our reading of the willingness to be thrown-in and the openness of the post-secular female pilgrims to the world is that these are subjects actively searching or looking for existential answers beyond what the secular or the traditional sacral realms can offer. In this sense, we can say that the ‘third space’ actuated by post-secular female pilgrims is an instance of female subjectivity, agency and autonomy.

As noted previously, we claim that hegemonic western feminist accounts of religion also spill over into conceptions of the post-secular, primarily in theorizations of religion as a space that forecloses female subjectivity, agency and autonomy. A distinctive feature of post-secular female pilgrimages is that these articulate female subjectivity, agency and autonomy that do not fit either a secularist or a pietist mode. Instead, these inhabit a ‘third space’, so to speak, one that is neither sensu strictu secular/modern nor religious/traditional. Post-secular female pilgrimages instantiate novel subjectivities that do not conform to the templates of the secular or the sacred. Rather, we argue that these may fruitfully be conceptualized as straddling the spaces of the in-between. In this sense, moreover, post-secular female pilgrimages are articulations of female subjectivity, agency and autonomy, which go beyond Braidotti’s (2008: 3) conceptualization of ‘radical counter-subjectivities’, such that the production of political subjectivity and agency is equated or reduced to oppositional engagements with the status quo, i.e. secularist conceptions of feminist agency. Secondly, post-secular female pilgrimages do not fit in either with conceptions of female subjectivity, agency and autonomy in the secular feminist theory tradition, or theorizations of the politics of piety and feminist subjectivity in ‘non-secular’ societies. Non-western theorizations of the religious, female autonomy and subjectivity take issue with the ‘teleological’ and ‘transcendental’ conceptions of progress and female power that characterize hegemonic western feminist conceptions (see, for example, Mahmood, 2005). However, the latter also fail to recognize female agency in a post-secular context.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have argued that post-secular female pilgrimages open up or produce a ‘third space’, one that cannot be properly theorized from the perspectives of secular feminism and its conceptions of subjectivity, agency and autonomy. Nor can perspectives from religious studies and its conceptions of piety as expressions of subjectivity, agency and autonomy capture the spatialities and subjectivities that define post-secular female pilgrims. The counter-subjectivities that emerge in the context of post-secular female pilgrimage practices and spatialities are of a different order in a double sense. Post-secular female pilgrimage practices and spatialities go against the secular/modern nomos in as much as they practice ways of being and relating to the world that eschew its rationalist and utilitarian precepts and ethos. Conversely, post-secular female pilgrimage practices and spatialities shun the canonical religious teachings and the nomos of institutionalized religion, in that they ‘chart out’ a third space that goes against religious dogma. Instead, post-secular female pilgrims relate to the world by negotiating and navigating through the fissures of both orders. Post-secular female pilgrimages intimate to Braidotti’s notion of nomadic subjectivities and consciousness, ‘combining coherence with mobility’ (2008: 13). In short, these pilgrimages constitute dissonant practices and mobilities, desires and pleasures that transcend the secular/modern and sacred/religious divide that has dominated research on the post-secular (Rasmussen, 2012; Woodhead, 2014; Schrijvers and Wiering, 2018). The ‘third space’ opened up by post-secular female pilgrimages may also provide a common ground for both western and non-western theorizations of gender, religion, female subjectivity, agency and autonomy. It heeds previous calls for revitalized feminist accounts of gender, society and religion. The same spirit lies at the heart of the present article. Our neologism ‘post-sexularism’ intimates to the masculine ontologies and epistemologies that have colored the post-secular debate. It is our hope that this neologism is tantalizing enough to elicit further engagement. Above all, we remain sanguine that our intervention will elicit further substantive engagements by feminist scholars on questions of pilgrimage, gender and the post-secular debate. For the post-secular debate gestures also to Voltaire’s famous adage: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’, a maxim that has currency still.