ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents black feminist piety, a framework for studying black religious women as knowledge producers who draw their knowledge base from gendered and racialized ways of enacting religiosity. She organizes black feminist piety using core themes of “patriarchy,” “conversion,” and “(non)citizenship”. Outside of womanism, mainstream feminism tends to unhesitatingly adopt all things secular while simultaneously labeling religious women as unfeminist and brainwashed. The feminism as secularism versus anti-feminist religiosity binary is limiting. In fact, the conditions created by secularity are fundamental to the proliferation of “conservative” religious movements, yet our ability to understand that relationship is limited by imposing a false dichotomy. Black feminist piety redefines the fixity of feminist definitions of agency and resistance by problematizing claims that agency consists primarily of acts that challenge social norms rather than those that seek to uphold norms.
