Holy Hierarchy
A podcast episode featuring Inna Shevchenko and her film documentary "Girls & Gods"
Girls, Gods & Inna Shevchenko
All major religions establish a hierarchy between the sexes, thereby devaluing women. Anyone who now objects that there are female bishops in the Protestant Church and that there is an Islamic female imam preaching in Berlin should consider the old cliché that “exceptions prove the rule” and its great inherent wisdom.
The central religious texts of the book religions speak a clear language: in the Ten Commandments, women are placed in the same category as property and livestock.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife or his slaves, or his animals, or anything of thy neighbour
In the Koran, the situation is only slightly different:
Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance - [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them. But if they obey you [once more], seek no means against them. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted and Grand.
In Islam, the veiling of women is an expression of patriarchal control. The self-liberation from headscarves, for example in the protests by Iranian women, is a courageous and revolutionary act of self-determination. This makes it all the more contradictory when the burqa, niqab, hidjab, etc. are celebrated as a sign of empowerment in Western societies. In Judaism, too, women are subject to religiously prescribed forms of head covering in the form of wigs. These practices of subjugation are not fundamentalist fringe phenomena, but expressions of religious norms. They are the normal religion that we in our enlightened societies often frame as radical misinterpretations of a well-meaning belief system that is only being politically abused. In fact, any interpretation of a modern, egalitarian religion is the real deviation.
Girl x Religion
Feminist activist Inna Shevchenko became internationally known a little over ten years ago with the Femen movement. She attracted worldwide attention in 2012 when she felled a wooden cross in Kyiv in solidarity with Pussy Riot. As a result of this motorized show of force against religiously legitimized oppression, she had to leave Ukraine. She continues to explore the role of women in religions in a screenplay for the documentary film “Girls & Gods,” which she made together with Verena Soltiz and Arash T. Riahi. Shevchenko guides the viewers through the film and talks to individual women and groups from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam who are believers, apostates, reformers, and converts.
The documentary shows how women within their religious communities fight for basic rights and for recognition (from men) that will probably always be denied them and which they confuse with self-determination. Their strategies range from conformity to silent resistance to attempts to reform religions from within in a way that attracts public attention. Watching the film, I am left with ambivalent feelings: regret for those who try in vain to change centuries-old systems of patriarchal order, and perplexity at those who try to rationalize and defend their own oppression instead of turning their backs on the obvious madness of religion.
Shevchenko does not judge these women. She calmly points out the contradictions and leaves it to the audience to draw their own conclusions.
I spoke with Inna Shevchenko for the Materie podcast.
