03/07/2026 09:00 - 11:10

HALL: Pola - A104

Contact: Bär M.

Chair: Bär M.

This panel examines how gendered inequalities are produced, stabilised, and contested through intermedial operations in religious and religion-inflected contexts, spanning early modern devotional literature and contemporary art. Rather than treating inequality as a secondary effect of belief or doctrine, both contributions conceptualise it as an outcome of historically specific discursive, performative, and medial configurations that distribute agency, authority, and visibility unevenly.
The first paper analyses early modern devotional literature as an intermedial site in which female agency is simultaneously enabled and restricted under conditions of male authorship and theological normativity. Drawing on a church-historical adaptation of Judith Butler's concept of performativity, it examines biblical figures such as Jael, Judith, and Lot's wife to show how agency becomes permissible only as a pious reiteration of divine order. Through the interweaving of biblical narration, exegesis, prayer, and poetic texts, female agency is rendered visible while remaining bound to humility, obedience, and gender-coded ideals.
The second paper develops a cross-temporal heuristic by analysing contemporary art as a multimodal environment in which religiously inflected gender norms continue to generate inequalities. Focusing on media operations such as repetition with difference, fragmentation, spatial re-coding, and ritualised inscription, it examines how gendered authority and addressability emerge across image, text, space, materiality, and institutional framing.
Together, the panel positions intermedial analysis as a key approach for studying religious inequalities, foregrounding how gendered asymmetries of agency and authority are produced and maintained through mediated operations across time.