5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

This panel examines the relationship between religion and gender in the forming and shaping of religious authority and its contestation across the two shores of the Mediterranean. Scholarship has extensively attended to the gendered experience of religion, thereby addressing particularly how women hold a paradoxical role within religious traditions as innovators and outsiders. Lesser attention has been given to the way in which gender appears as important site of governmental intervention vis-a-vis religion, as well as how gender becomes one of the loci of contestation of these same processes. This panel seeks to examine this double role of gender, and the ways in which ongoing sociological processes and dynamics of state-making, securitisation, migration, secularisation entail a redefinition of what counts as religious authority and the central role of gender in that process. Attention will be given (but is not restricted to) the role of new female religious authorities in the fight against religious extremism, the reassessment of masculinity in the governance of religion, new religious hermeneutics and gender, the creation of new gendered spaces in migration, irreligiosity through gender etc.