Public debates depict Arabs as opposed to gender equality because of Islam. However, there may be substantial numbers of Arab Muslims who do support feminist issues and who do so while being highly attached to Islam. This study explains why certain Arabs support feminism while remaining strongly religious. We propose that some Arab citizens are more likely to subvert patriarchal norms, especially in societies that construct Islam and feminism as more compatible. Empirically, we apply three-level multinomial analyses to 51 Arab (...) Barometer and World Values Surveys, which include 57,000 Arab Muslims. Our results show that one in four Arab Muslims supports Muslim feminism—far more than those who support a more secularist version of feminism. Employed women, single people, people who distrust institutions, and more highly educated people support Muslim feminism more than do others—especially in societies that construct feminism and Islam as less contradictory, such as those with strong feminist movements. The presumption that Islam and feminism are necessarily opposed may hinder feminism. A more effective way to boost gender equality in the Arab region may be to embolden emancipatory religious interpretations. (shrink)

This article probes the relative absence of religion within discussions of intersectionality, and begins to address this absence by bringing intersectionality studies into conversation with another significant field within feminist theory: the study of religious women's agency. Although feminist literatures on intersectionality and religious women's agency have garnered a great deal of scholarly attention, these two bodies of work have rarely been engaged together. After surveying both fields, I argue that research on religious women's agency not only exposes an ambiguity (...) at the heart of intersectionality between identity and oppression, but also challenges several aspects of intersectionality studies, especially as recent theorists increasingly turn away from identity politics in favor of a structural critique of power. These aspects of intersectionality include its often unsituated critique of power, as well as its reliance on a negatively defined consensus on anti-oppression. (shrink)

Social scientists agree that women are generally more religious than men, but disagree about whether the differences are universal or contingent on social context. This study uses General Social Survey data to explore differences in religiosity between, as well as among, women and men by level of individual earned income. Extending previous research, I focus on high earners with other groups included for comparison. Predicted probabilities based upon fully interacted models provide four key findings: There are no significant gender differences (...) among high earners; high-earning women are less religious than low-earning women; high-earning men are more religious than low-earning men; and differences among women and among men at different earnings levels are just as large as average differences between women and men. Further analyses demonstrate that the relationship between gender, earnings, and religiosity varies by race. The findings demonstrate the utility of intersectional approaches for understanding gender differences in religiosity. Beyond the implications specific to the gender differences in religiosity literature, this study also indicates that religion is an important, yet often underemphasized, aspect of our intersectional selves. (shrink)

Much is said about Middle Eastern and North African publics opposing gender equality, often referring to patriarchal Islam. However, nuanced large-scale studies addressing which specific aspects of religiosity affect support for gender equality across the MENA are conspicuously absent. This study develops and tests a gendered agentic socialization framework that proposes that MENA citizens are not only passively socialized by religion but also have agency. This disaggregates the influence of religiosity, highlights its multifacetedness, and theorizes the moderating roles that gender (...) and sociocognitive empowerment play via gendered processes of agentic dissociations. Using 15 World Values Surveys and multilevel models, our analyses show that most dimensions of religiosity fuel opposition to gender equality. However, the salience of religion in daily life is found to increase women’s support for gender equality and cushion the negative impact of religious service attendance. Also, gender and education moderate the impacts of several religiosity dimensions; for instance, women’s support for gender equality more sharply declines with increased service attendance than men’s. Altogether, this study finds that religious socialization is multifaceted and gendered, and that certain men and women are inclined and equipped to deviate from dominant patriarchal religious interpretations. (shrink)