01/07/2026 16:10 - 19:30

HALL: Pola - School of Journalism

Contact: Giorgi A.

Chair: Giorgi A., Palmisano S.

This panel investigates how gendered norms and power relations are produced, negotiated and contested across religious, spiritual and post-secular contexts in contemporary Europe. While research on gender and religion has increasingly moved beyond binaries of oppression versus emancipation, divergent empirical sites continue to reveal tensions between institutional authority, personal agency and cultural expectations.


The contributions assemble multi-sited analyses, ranging from yoga cultures to Catholic women's organizations and Jewish feminist reform movements in Italy, to queer negotiations within Lithuanian Catholicism, and debates over the Istanbul Convention on Lithuanian mass media. Drawing on methodologies including discourse and content analysis, ethnography and qualitative interviewing, the papers collectively demonstrate how religious and spiritual formations both reproduce and unsettle dominant gender regimes.


Exclusionary mechanisms emerge through embodied norms and religious-doctrinal discursive boundary-work; yet actors also adopt agentic strategies (including feminist and queer approaches) to expand the meanings and understandings of religion, and reconfigure religious authority and norms. At the same time, struggles over gender unfold across religious institutions, media, civil society and everyday life, where religious actors remain key participants in broader cultural debates on sexuality, family and citizenship. In this perspective, the hybrid public and mass media discourse play an extremely relevant role in contributing to shaping the discursive opportunity structures in which individual actors and religious institutions operate. Hence, the panel offers a broad and encompassing overview of contemporary relationships between religion and gender.