Post/secular truths: Sojourner Truth and the intersections of gender,race and religion

Contextualizing the postsecular engagement with religion

Rosi Braidotti introduces the postsecular turn as a challenge for European feminism, ‘because it makes manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can actually be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality’ (Braidotti, 2008: 2). Her assumption is here that the dominant streams of European feminism are primarily secular: ‘agnostic, if not downright atheist’ (Braidotti, 2008: 3). While Braidotti does acknowledge the existence and even flourishing of religious feminist traditions (Braidotti, 2008: 7), she nevertheless positions them as non-secular exceptions that serve to confirm rather than disrupt the secular rule. While the mainstream story about feminism may be a secular one, this story leaves out many other voices, both from the past and the present (Sawyer and Collier, 1999; Woodhead, 1999). For example, Catholic feminist theologian Tina Beattie has argued that ‘the secular sisterhood silences women’s theological voices’ (Beattie, 1999: 116). Beattie speaks of a deliberate exclusion of feminist theology from the mainstream of feminist theory, which she characterizes as a ‘painful conflict between Christian and secular feminisms’ (Beattie, 1999: 125). These comments are a reminder that the question of religion in/and feminism is not only a contemporary concern. They are also a reminder that this question is not only a concern in the context of contemporary Islamophobia, but one that crosses religious lines. The turn to the postsecular is often fuelled by a concern about the growing Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism across Europe that has become especially noticeable since 9/11. The opposition that is often staged between feminism and religion in general, and feminism and Islam in particular, is recognized as highly problematic by feminists because it feeds into Islamophobic, xenophobic and neocolonialist political discourses (Bracke, 2011; Midden, 2012; Scott, 2007). In my assessment, this work of challenging Islamophobic employments of feminist discourses and countering the supposed clash between feminism and Islam is very important. However, it is also important to keep in mind that the conflict between religious and secular feminisms is not a new one, and not specific to the Islamophobic present. Secular conceptions of feminism do not just exclude Muslim feminists, but have also excluded Christian and Jewish feminists, for example.

Thus, rather than conceiving of the postsecular as a new turn, a new moment in feminism that breaks with a previous trend of secularism in the context of countering Islamophobia, this article argues that it is more fruitful for scholars of the postsecular to recognize the long history of coexistence and contestations between secular and non-secular forms of feminist theorizing. In this way, the renewed attention for religion within feminist theorizing can draw on the long engagement with religion that has taken place for example in feminist theology, and actively counter the trend of ‘amnesia about religious feminisms’ (Sands, 2008: 309). In order to demonstrate both how the current amnesia about religious feminisms takes shape, as well as show how it might be challenged, I will turn to the story of Sojourner Truth and its reception within feminist scholarship.

Intersections of race and gender

The reception history of the story of the famous 19th-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth illustrates both how a particular secular version of feminist history becomes dominant, and also reveals the religious counter-discourses that exist alongside the mainstream feminist story. In the ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ speech, Sojourner Truth called into question her own position as a black and formerly enslaved woman in the women’s movement of her time. To a male interlocutor who stated that women were weak and physically inferior to men, Truth answered, ‘Look at me. Look at my arm! I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman?’ With this statement, Truth questioned conventional ideas about women’s capabilities by drawing on her life experiences as a formerly enslaved woman. Through a repeated use of the seemingly straightforward question ‘and ain’t I a woman?’, Sojourner Truth called attention to the differences between women and the specific position and experiences of black and (formerly) enslaved women. Besides the male interlocutor who Truth addressed directly at the rally, her provocative question has also been interpreted as directed at white feminists. With the phrase ‘and ain’t I a woman?’ Truth challenged the limits of who was represented by the women’s movement, exposing racism and exclusions within the women’s movement of her time.

The story of Sojourner Truth became an inspirational story for black feminist scholarship as it emerged in the US in the 1970s and 1980s. Sojourner Truth is taken up as an ‘archetypal black feminist’ (Joseph, 1990). The reclaiming of historical figures such as Sojourner Truth has been an important strategy for black feminists in their efforts to draw attention to the complex oppression that black women face. As black women, they are oppressed not only by sexist structures, but also by racism – both within the women’s movement and outside of it. In 1981, the literary scholar bell hooks published her debut work: Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (hooks, 1981). In this famous work, hooks provides an historical overview of the marginalized and often invisible position of black women in the feminist movement, spanning from the time of slavery to the present. Caught between the sexism of the black movement and the racism of the women’s movement, hooks powerfully shows how black women’s struggle is one which has to be fought on many fronts at the same time. The historical Sojourner Truth is not analysed or discussed at length in the book, and the phrase ‘Ain’t I a woman’ is not even explicitly attributed to Sojourner Truth. Nevertheless, hooks’ choice to make this particular quote the title of the book suggests that it captures the marginalized position of black women within the feminist movement. It indicates that Sojourner Truth’s seminal question has not lost its relevance for black feminists (hooks, 1989: 164).

In the essay ‘Writing autobiography’, bell hooks (1989) reflects on her own choice to use the phrase ‘Ain’t I a woman’ as the title of her work. The popularity of Sojourner Truth and the phrase ‘Ain’t I a woman’ in the feminist movement at the time meant that hooks saw no need to attribute the phrase to Truth explicitly, because her readership could be assumed to catch the intertextual reference. In addition to this pragmatic reason, there is also a conceptual reason why hooks chose to use the phrase without an explicit reference to the historical Sojourner Truth. As she explains, rather than laying claim to the specific words, hooks ‘sought to lay claim to the experience they evoked, to shift the attention away from personal identity, speaker, back to the words themselves and the meaning they evoked’ (hooks, 1989: 164). In other words, rather than using the phrase to reference the historical individual black woman known as Sojourner Truth, hooks wanted to use the phrase to link to what she saw as a universal experience that many black women shared. Furthermore, by removing the question mark from the quote by Truth, hooks turns the question into a defiant statement that claims black women’s position in the feminist movement.

The story of Sojourner Truth is also often referenced to clarify the concept of intersectionality, that is the insight that different forms of inequality should not be analysed as separate and distinct from each other, but instead as interacting or intersecting with each other. Recently, Kathy Davis has suggested that the phrase ‘ “Ain’t I a woman” expresses the intersectionality of identity in a nutshell’ (Davis, 2008: 80, n. 10). In the seminal article in which the critical legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined the term intersectionality, she uses the story of Sojourner Truth to clarify the central thematics it refers to (Crenshaw, 1989). Crenshaw suggests that, like in Sojourner Truth’s time, feminist theory in the 1980s is still all too often ‘narrowly constructed around white women’s experiences’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 154–155). Crenshaw concludes,

When feminist theory and politics that claim to reflect women’s experience and women’s aspirations do not include or speak to Black women, Black women must ask: ‘Ain’t We Women?’ If this is so, how can the claims that ‘women are’, ‘women believe’ and ‘women need’ be made when such claims are inapplicable or unresponsive to the needs, interests and experiences of Black women. (Crenshaw, 1989: 154)

Like bell hooks, Crenshaw suggests that black women should take up Sojourner Truth’s question as their own in order to claim their position within a feminist movement that does not have (enough) attention for the questions of race and racism. Crenshaw suggests that black women should take up Truth’s refrain to challenge the white feminist tradition, stressing that Truth’s speech was as much a challenge to the exclusionary and racist white women’s movement of her time, as it was directed to male opponents. As a result, ‘Contemporary white feminists inherit not the legacy of Truth’s challenge to patriarchy but, instead, Truth’s challenge to their forbearers’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 154). This challenge, Crenshaw notes, is all too often not met, despite the popularity of the phrase and the story.

In both hooks and Crenshaw’s reading of the story of Sojourner Truth, Truth emerges as an exemplary figure for black feminism: a figure who pointed out at a very early point that gender is not the only axis of oppression, and cannot be seen separately from questions of race and racism. It is this version of Sojourner Truth that lives on in feminist theorizing, for example in the texts by Nina Lykke and Avtar Brah and Ann Phoenix (Brah and Phoenix, 2004; Lykke, 2010). ² Here, what is at stake in taking up Sojourner Truth is primarily the intersection between gender and race. Religion as one of the central dimensions of the story is not remarked upon, making these readings implicitly secular. The observation that religion is sidelined in these feminist readings of the figure and story of Sojourner Truth should not be understood as claiming that there is necessarily something wrong, or something lacking in these readings. The mobilization of the story of Sojourner Truth for black feminism and the theorizing of intersectionality has been extremely important for feminist scholarship. I am thus not arguing that hooks or Crenshaw should have called attention to the intersection of religion in the story, I simply note that religious angles to the story and figure of Sojourner Truth are not often mentioned in this particular strand of feminist theorizing. For feminist receptions that acknowledge and theorize the religious dimensions, one has to turn to feminist and womanist theological readings of Sojourner Truth.

Sojourner Truth as inspiration for religious feminists

In Sojourner Truth’s famous ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ speech, religious arguments are brought up in four instances. First of all, Truth refers to her suffering as an enslaved mother, stating that she was abandoned by everyone except Jesus, who heard her call out in grief. In her moment of suffering, those around her had no eye for her distress, but she found solace in her faith. Second, she effectively and humorously dismisses the argument of Christ’s maleness to justify women’s inferiority by responding to a clergyman in the audience: ‘where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman, man had nothing to do with him’ (Truth, 2005 [1850]). Third, she refers to Eve and the original sin, suggesting that it should be read positively as a sign of women’s strength that should be put to use to fight against injustices. Lastly, Truth’s assertion that ‘no man could head me’ could be interpreted as defiance of the religious notion of male headship: the idea that men are the natural and logical leaders of the church and family. ³ In Truth’s famous speech, then, religious arguments and references are tightly interwoven with her plea for women’s rights. This indicates that Truth’s faith not only inspired her to fight against injustices that she lived through in her own life and that she witnessed around her, it also provided her with the tools to do so. This is what makes Truth an interesting figure for feminist and womanist theologians, who work inside religious communities and systems to critique mainstream/malestream theology and to open up new ways of reading and believing.

Womanist theologian Jacquelyn Grant, for example, interprets Truth’s love for Jesus as a motor behind her abolitionist and feminist activism: ‘This love was not a sentimental, passive love. It was a tough, active love that empowered her to fight more fiercely for the freedom of her people’ (Grant, 1989: 214). In White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (1989), Grant criticizes feminist theology as both a white and racist project. Grant argued that white feminist theologians participate in a racist logic of taking white experiences as universal (Grant, 1989: 200). Although white feminist theologians were eager to point out the blind-spots in male theological work, they were unable to recognize the exclusionary effect that their own work had on women who were not white (Grant, 1989: 5). In contrast to this racist feminist theology which takes white women’s experiences as the unchallenged norm, Grant calls for a womanist theology. Following Alice Walker’s terminology (Walker, 1983), the adjective ‘womanist’ has been taken up by African American feminist theologians to signal their attention for the connections of sexism and racism and their critical attitude towards feminist theological work that does not take into account the particularity of black women’s experiences and the role that racism and classism play in the oppression of black women. Grant stresses that ‘the daily struggles of poor Black women must serve as the gauge for the verification of the claims of womanist theology’ (Grant, 1989: 210).

For black women, Grant argues, the Bible is not necessarily the primary source of knowledge of Jesus. Sojourner Truth serves as an illustration of that lesson, because she remarked: ‘When I preaches, I has jest one text to preach from, an’ I always preaches from this one. My text is, “When I found Jesus!” ’ (Grant, 1989: 214) . ⁴ Grant argues that rather than relying only on scripture primarily, a personal experience of Jesus is equally if not more important for black women. Thus, although the presentations of Jesus in the Bible may be patriarchal, black women have a different access to Jesus: through an experience that is empowering, liberating and personal (Grant, 1989: 214). In the context of this intensely personal relationship with Jesus, the classic feminist theological question about the maleness of Jesus (‘Can a male saviour save women?’ [Ruether, 1983]) is not that relevant. Grant posits that ‘The significance of Christ is not his maleness, but his humanity’ (Grant, 1989: 220). Grant identifies Christ with the most oppressed, and this means identifying Christ as a black woman (Grant, 1989: 220). Here, black women in general, and Sojourner Truth in particular, are framed as a Jesus-figure of sorts. Grant closes her book with another citation from Sojourner Truth from a speech known as ‘What time of night it is’ (Truth, 2005 [1850]). In this speech, Truth warns that she will hold white feminists accountable for including her perspective as a ‘colored woman’: ‘I am sittin’ among you to watch; and every once in a while I will come out and tell you what time of night it is’ (Grant, 1989: 222). By closing with this quote, Grant urges black feminists to take on Sojourner Truth’s critical stance: in this case, a critical stance directed towards white feminism and white feminist theology. A deep resonance between Grant’s own work in feminist theology and Sojourner Truth’s intervention at women’s rights meetings is suggested: both are speaking up for black women, ‘getting up and telling white feminists about things’. It is not just Sojourner Truth who is sitting among us, but Grant herself can be counted on to come out and tell us what time it is.

A second theologian who writes more extensively about Sojourner Truth is the feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who rejects the dominant malestream models of theological research as androcentric, patriarchal and kyriarchal. The term kyriarchy is one which Fiorenza introduces in order to recognize that domination does not work only through gender, but also through hierarchies of race/ethnicity, class, religion, education and other factors. Sexism is not the only force of oppression at play: instead, different systems of oppression interlock and co-constitute each other. Where patriarchy refers to the domination of men over women, kyriarchy designates instead ‘a complex social pyramid of graduated dominations and subordinations … the rule of the emperor/master/lord/father/husband over his subordinates’ (Fiorenza, 1994: 14). Throughout her work, Fiorenza is not so much interested in the question of whether God exists, but rather asks: ‘what kind of G-d Christians imagine and how they speak about the Divine in a world of alienation, injustice, exploitation and suffering’ (Fiorenza, 1992: 158). The spelling G-d or G*d is preferred by Fiorenza, as it indicates for her the incapacity of humans to fully know G*d.

For Fiorenza, Sojourner Truth serves as a ‘hermeneutical guide for … a paradigm shift’ (Fiorenza, 1994: 34) within theology and biblical studies. Instead of centring the biblical text, this paradigm shift foregrounds praxis and experience. The critical articulation and analysis of everyday experiences of wo/men enable a different way of relating to the Bible, the church and the religious tradition. The claim that women are responsible for original sin, accepted by Sojourner Truth in her speech, is one that Fiorenza herself considers kyriarchal and traditional. However, Fiorenza emphasizes that Truth interprets this claim in a novel and surprising way: ‘Exactly because wo/man was implicated in and collaborated in the original fall, wo/men cannot continue to understand themselves as innocent victims but must get together to make right the perversions of the world wrought by oppression and domination’ (Fiorenza, 2001: 161). It is in this getting together that Fiorenza sees as Sojourner Truth’s greatest contribution to feminist theology:

Neither Sojourner herself nor even Jesus is the locus of liberation and salvation, but rather wo/men’s movements for change and transformation. In my view, her speech pioneers a theological approach that locates G*d, Christ, and the possibility of salvation in a wo/men’s movement concerned with justice and well-being for all. (Fiorenza, 2001: 161)

Sojourner Truth’s pioneering intervention is identified as empowering women to redefine and rework the dominant interpretations of Jesus by the kyriarchal christology, and in calling on all women to get together to fight against oppression and for liberation. This different way of interpreting scripture should correspond to the struggles of women and other marginalized groups: it should be liberatory and emancipatory, and rooted in movements of solidarity and struggle.

For both Grant and Fiorenza, the theological inspiration that the story of Sojourner Truth provides lies in the way in which Truth uses religious arguments in her public speaking for abolitionist and feminist causes. However, where Fiorenza primarily draws on the ‘Ain’t I a woman? speech, Grant draws on a wider range of speeches and quotes by (or attributed to) Truth. The variety of sources used by Grant indicates that she uses the story in a way that transcends the ‘tokenized’ use of Truth as symbol that historian Nell Painter has disparaged (Painter, 1996). In both authors, however, the story of Sojourner Truth is a stepping stone to make their own theological argument. Grant and Fiorenza have in common that they centre experience. However, where Grant explicitly starts with black women’s experience, Fiorenza discusses wo/men in a broader sense. Her choice for the phrase wo/men is meant to ‘indicate the instability in the meaning of the term, but also to signal that when I say wo/men I also mean to include subordinated men’ (Fiorenza, 2001: 4, n. 10). Fiorenza indicates that she does not consider women a unified and homogeneous group, and that she recognizes the differences between how different groups are marginalized and oppressed. Another difference between the two is that Fiorenza puts the emphasis on the collective effort of wo/men: it is the getting together and cooperation among wo/men to fight against oppression that is foregrounded as the central theological breakthrough. For both theologians, (a reading of) Sojourner Truth enables a different way of relating to mainstream theological traditions – in Fiorenza’s case the hegemonic male tradition, and in Grant’s case the white feminist one as well.

Contrasting these womanist and feminist theological readings with the secular feminist readings discussed before, we can note both similarities as well as differences. In all cases, the story of Sojourner Truth is brought in to complicate the exclusive focus on sex/gender (in)equality in feminism, and to recognize difference. The story of Truth’s intervention in Akron, Ohio manages to vividly emphasize the importance of a more complex account of difference and inequality within feminism. Black feminist scholars in particular take up the story of Sojourner Truth to thematize the position of black women in a feminist context dominated by (implicit) whiteness. In this sense, Jacquelyn Grant’s indictment of the white feminist ‘norm’ in feminist theology resonates with the broader black feminist critique of white feminism, for example the one found in bell hooks. Grant, hooks and Crenshaw all at some point explicitly identify with Sojourner Truth – in hooks’ and Crenshaw’s case, by taking up the question ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ as their own, and in Grant’s case by taking up Truth’s role of ‘telling [white feminists] what time it is’.

Another interesting point of comparison between the secular and the theological work is found in the concepts of kyriarchy and intersectionality. The recognition that gender is not the only or even the primary mode of inequality is central to both concepts. However, the term kyriarchy puts the focus on the multiplicity in the structures of power and the system of domination. It focuses on the structures of power themselves, and how these are connected. Intersectionality, on the other hand, is most often used to analyse the effects of power: to look at the ways in which different types of oppressions come together in a particular identity, experience or social situation. Intersectionality has been taken up as a lens of analysis, a mode of looking which has attention for the ways in which different forms of inequality interact and co-constitute each other. In other words, where kyriarchy could be said to denote a perspective from the outside, focusing on the system behind the intersecting inequalities, intersectional analyses often starts from within that system, with lived experience or a specific phenomenon in which different forms of inequality intersect. Despite the closeness of these concepts and the ways in which they complement each other, there seems to be very little reflection within secular feminist theory about their differences and similarities. As I noted earlier, this is an indication of the fraught relationship between feminist theory and feminist theology that various scholars have commented on (Beattie, 1999; Sawyer and Collier, 1999; Woodhead, 1999). As Linda Woodhead notes, feminism and women’s studies scholars often ignore feminist theological work and fail to engage with it (Woodhead, 1999: 202). As a result, feminist theology exists as a field of study that is quite isolated from feminist theory. My impression is that while the theologians that I have discussed are aware of and engaging in the debates going on within secular feminist theory, this awareness is more lacking in the other direction: secular feminist theorists do not often engage with the work of feminist theologians in the same way.

Challenging binaries

In the text ‘Ecce homo, ain’t (ar’n’t) i a woman, and inappropriate/d others: The human in a posthumanist landscape’, the feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway provides a reading of Sojourner Truth that is not religiously or theologically inspired, but nevertheless has attention for the role that religion plays in the story. For example, Haraway recounts the religious vision through which Truth received her name, emphasizes that Truth was a travelling preacher, and calls attention to Truth’s argument about Jesus being a product of God and a woman. Bringing together Truth and Christ and suggesting a comparison between them, Haraway’s text resonates with the feminist and womanist theological readings by Fiorenza and Grant. Yet despite her attention to the religious elements, Haraway positions her own reading not in a religious or theological context, but in the context of a feminist (post)humanism. Haraway reads together Jesus Christ and Sojourner Truth as two figures that disrupt the dominant narrative of Enlightenment humanism, which figures the human as a coherent, stable and rational subject. For Haraway, both Jesus Christ and Sojourner Truth are examples of a different figuration of humanity: the figure of a suffering servant, ‘the figure of a broken and suffering humanity, signifying – in ambiguity, contradiction, stolen symbolism, and unending chains of noninnocent translation – a possible hope’ (Haraway, 1992: 87). Haraway explains the strength of the story of Sojourner Truth by calling attention to:

Sojourner Truth’s power to figure a collective humanity without constructing the cosmic closure of the unmarked category. Quite the opposite, her body, names, and speech – their forms, contents, and articulations – may be read to hold promise for a never-settled universal, a common language that makes compelling claims on each of us collectively, and personally, precisely through their radical specificity, in other words, through the displacements and resistances to unmarked identity precisely as the means to claiming the status of ‘the human.’ The essential Truth would not settle down; that was her specificity. (Haraway, 1992: 92)

In this passage, it becomes clear that Haraway offers a deconstructive reading of Sojourner Truth, in which Truth is a trickster figure and a shape-shifter. The question mark at the end of Truth’s refrain ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ is absolutely crucial for Haraway’s interpretation (Trimble Alliaume, 1998). For Haraway, it is Truth’s question that continues to haunt feminism, rather than any particular answer to the question. This stands in stark contrast with the interpretation by bell hooks who turned the question into a statement and a claim. In her discussion of Haraway’s reading of Sojourner Truth, the feminist theologian Karen Trimble Alliaume concludes that ‘[t]he point is not that Sojourner Truth is, obviously, a woman; it is that this conclusion is not so obvious at all, and that this moment of uncertainty – in her Akron, Ohio, audience, in the readers of the various versions of her speech – is the moment when both “womanhood” and “humanity” lie open to radical resignification’ (Trimble Alliaume, 1998: 8). While many feminist scholars, including those that I have discussed so far, would have the tendency to quickly answer yes to the question ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, what Haraway suggests is that this is perhaps too easy, and that the difficulty for feminists rather lies in the fact that the question had to be asked in the first place and the uncertainty and unsettledness of categories that it brings forth. In Haraway’s deconstructive reading, the ambiguity within the figure and the story of Sojourner Truth is not considered a weakness, but rather a strength. For Haraway, Truth is a figure who ‘seized her body and speech to turn “difference” into an organon for placing the painful realities and practices of de-construction, dis-identification, and dis-memberment in the service of a new humanity’ (Haraway, 1992: 93). What Haraway suggests here is that the unconventional story of Sojourner Truth radically calls in question the normative ideal of the human as we have inherited it from Enlightenment humanism: the image of the rational, stable, coherent subject, who not coincidentally is also envisioned as white, male and able-bodied. In contrast to this vision of the human, the Sojourner Truth that Haraway presents is a figure that troubles boundaries and binaries, including the boundary between the human and the non-human.

This project of troubling and unsettling boundaries and binaries is one which runs through Haraway’s thinking as a whole. Haraway herself indicates: ‘All of my writing is committed to swerving and tripping over these bipartite, dualist traps rather than trying to reverse them or resolve them into supposedly larger wholes’ (Haraway, 2004: 2). Binaries that Haraway is known for taking on are the human and animal binary, the dualism between body and technology and the nature/culture dichotomy. By bringing Sojourner Truth together with Jesus Christ in this text, I argue that Haraway unsettles yet another binary: the binary between the religious and the secular. She challenges the neat separation of religious and non-religious, and secular and non-secular traditions within feminism. While the feminist and womanist theologians previously discussed also bring together Jesus Christ and Sojourner Truth, they do so from an explicitly religious angle. Haraway, on the other hand, crosses the boundaries of the religious and the secular in emphasizing the importance of religion in the story of Sojourner Truth without restricting the impact of this reading of Sojourner Truth to a particular audience – either secular or religious.

In an interview, Haraway reflects on the complex relationship between the religious and theological inspirations and more secular or atheist commitments in her work. She remarks that she is deeply shaped by her Catholic upbringing and that she has been trained in theological ways of thinking: ‘I am also deeply formed by theology, and particularly by Roman Catholic theology and practice. I learned it. I studied it. It is deep in my bones’ (Haraway, 2004: 333). Nevertheless, she sees herself as an atheist and even positions herself as anti-Christian: ‘Well, you know, I am, of course, a committed atheist and anti-Catholic, anyway at some level. I cannot live in Christian right-wing U.S. culture and not be an anti-Christian’ (Haraway, 2004: 334). For Haraway, these two positions are not in contradiction with each other. The theological and the secular are not two clearly demarcated terrains, and she does not need to put her allegiance with one side or the other. Instead, it is the tension and the conflict between the two that is fruitful and inspiring. With her reading of Sojourner Truth, Haraway thus not only troubles the binary of human and the non-human, but equally the binary of the religious and the secular.

Recognizing intersections

In this article, I have shown that religious elements in the story of Sojourner Truth are downplayed by some feminist scholars, but foregrounded by others. My account has thus demonstrated that non-secular feminist readings exist alongside secular feminist readings and do not chronologically precede or follow them. The idea that a turn to religion is new, specific to the current postsecular moment in feminist scholarship, is thus not substantiated by these coexisting secular and non-secular readings of the story of Sojourner Truth. In this sense, one can speak of intersections between religious and non-religious feminisms. The secular, religious and deconstructive readings of Truth that I have highlighted here all bring something unique to the debate. Bringing these readings into dialogue with each other has allowed me to recognize their points of intersection and of divergence. One point of intersection that I want to further explore in this conclusion is the intersection of religion with race. As I have pointed out, black feminist scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and bell hooks have tended to focus on the intersections of gender and race in the ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ speech, whereas theologians such as Grant and Fiorenza have called attention to the intersection of religious arguments with feminist arguments. In these different readings, religion and race function as separate categories that each may intersect with gender, but that do not necessarily intersect with each other. What might be gained from looking at the intersection of religion with race?

Contemporary critical race scholarship has pointed out that race and religion should not be considered discrete and separate categories, but recognizes instead the considerable overlap and interplay between them in (contemporary forms of) racism. In many cases, religious differences can serve as a rationalization for discrimination and exclusion. In such cases, religious differences are racialized: a supposed difference in religion becomes the grounds to dismiss and discriminate against a group. This phenomenon has alternatively been called a neoracism, a culturalist racism or a racism without race (Balibar, 1991; Harrison, 2002). More recently, Leerom Medovoi has argued that this type of culturalist racism should not be considered as fundamentally separate or distinct from biological forms of racism. Instead, he argues that racism can be understood to function through two different mechanisms: a ‘color line’ and a ‘dogma line’ (Medovoi, 2012). While colour line racism refers to supposed biological and phenotypical differences, dogma line racism refers to supposed differences in beliefs, faiths and ideas. Although Medovoi investigates the interplay of these different racial logics in the context of the war on terror and contemporary Islamophobia, he contends that the racialization based on religious or ideological differences knows a long history. He traces a ‘long genealogy of the interpenetrations of religious and racial discourse’ (Medovoi, 2012: 52) that starts with the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century.

The case of anti-Semitism clearly illustrates the intertwining of the two types of race making: Jewishness, initially understood as a religious or ideological identity, became biologized in the 19th century. According to Medovoi, ‘this color-line racialization overlay and exacerbated a dogma-line racism … while it is surely correct to observe that Jews were not considered white, their “race” remained fundamentally associated with an ideological disposition, with a set of beliefs that delivered their loyalty to a different political authority’ (Medovoi, 2012: 67). Medovoi calls attention to the fact that religion and religious differences have long played a role in race making practices. In contemporary Islamophobia, Muslims are targeted because of differences in ideology, but this difference has a physical and embodied component as well. Medovoi takes the figure of the terrorist as his case, but for a feminist analysis the familiar trope of the veiled woman can perhaps serve as a better example. As feminist scholars have long pointed out, conflicts over the supposed incompatibility of Islam with so-called secular western modernity have been fought out over the heads – specifically veils – of Muslim women. Here, we can note that a complex intersection of gender, religion and race is at play.

In the story of Sojourner Truth, these factors play a role as well, albeit in a very different configuration and in a very different historical context. Sojourner Truth’s religiosity does not make Truth unique among 19th-century feminists, black or white. In Truth’s time, her religiosity was not exceptional, because religiously inspired feminism was the norm. As Joan Scott points out, ‘historians have reminded feminists who equate religion, patriarchy and the subordination of women, that the first wave of feminism drew on deeply held religious principles for its arguments’ (Scott, 2009: 9). The case of Sojourner Truth can function as a particularly efficient reminder of this historical intertwinement of religion and feminism, and thus help counter the ‘current amnesia about religion’ (Woodhead, 1999). The fact that religiosity was the norm in her time means that, in Truth’s case, religion was not a point of discrimination or differentiation but rather something that connected her to white feminists. The use of religious arguments in Truth’s speech was effective because it drew on a source of authority that her listeners could relate to. The way in which religion intersected in Sojourner Truth’s story is thus very different from the way in which religion intersects in the contemporary debate about feminism and Islam, where religion is not a basis for recognition but rather a source of discrimination.

Despite this different role of religion in Truth’s times and in the contemporary moment, it is exactly an intersection of race and religion that is at stake both in Truth’s story and in the contemporary debate on the postsecular turn in feminism. For many scholars of the postsecular, the contemporary Islamophobic and xenophic political discourses are a strong motivation to re-examine the role of religion in feminist scholarship (Bracke, 2011; Braidotti, 2008; Midden, 2010). It is important to recognize that what is at stake is not just a question of racism, nor just a question of a rejection of religion, but rather the intersection of religion and race in contemporary Islamophobia. The reception history of the story of Sojourner Truth shows that there is a tendency to treat race and religion as two different axes of difference that are to be discussed separately. Yet instead of treating them as essentially different and disconnected, I have called attention to how these two axes can be seen to intersect as well. Recognizing the intersections of gender, race and religion in the story of Sojourner Truth opens up for a reading of Truth which goes beyond reclaiming her as an icon for either black feminism or for religious feminism. Recognizing religion as a relevant point of intersection thus opens up a reading of Sojourner Truth that makes this story relevant for the contemporary context in which racializing discourses make use of religious difference as an argument to other and exclude.