“Women in Mosques”: mapping the gendered religious space through online activism

ABSTRACT

Initiated in October 2017 by a group of Muslim women in Turkey, the activism of Women in Mosques aims to increase public awareness regarding the gendered organization of the religious space. Turkey’s patriarchal religious and cultural dynamics exhibit a gender-segregated organization of the mosque area, which treats men as the primary religious audience while isolating women in limited spaces. Using online tools such as their website and social media pages, Women in Mosques encourages women to participate in their digital campaign to reveal experiences of marginalization in mosques through testimonials. In addition to exposing the gendered and spatial ideology of the mosque that subordinates women, Women in Mosques also endeavors to employ potential means of resistance by fostering digital solidarity. This paper aims to analyze the bodily and digital strategies of women resisting the spatial organization of the religious space as a field of power. In this regard, the mapping of religious spaces through the representation of ideological spatiality and cartography constitutes the major strategies applied by activists to tackle the patriarchal making of the religious space.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• feminism
• Islam
• space
• Turkey
• online activism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

The author reported no potential conflict of interest.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alparslan Nas

Alparslan Nas is an Associate Professor at Marmara University Faculty of Communication. His research critically analyzes the representations of power, ideologies and resistances in Turkish media and visual culture. He is the author of Media Representations of the Cultural Other in Turkey published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. E-mail: [email protected]