ABSTRACT
The chapter serves as a summary and outlook for the part on religion, gender and activism. Intersectional, feminist, gender-queer, postcolonial and post-secular approaches are especially sensitive for the violence of societal or global political and symbolic orders and not least of theological and religious “speaking” itself. Postcolonial, post-secular and queer theology and critique of religion underline in common with historic contextual liberation theologies the partly resistant, visionary character of religious texts and practices. However, they show the sometimes unintended violent, essentialist, identitarian approaches by applying a poststructuralist epistemology and critique of science and shift the focus from representation to agency. The chapter introduces these different approaches and brings them together for a further debate. Furthermore, it seems to be necessary because some parts of the study of religion do not accept activist knowledge as a partner in academia and contribution to knowledge generation.
By connecting the debates particularly with the context of East Germany, the chapter highlights the agency of Eastern European dissidence which led to the Peaceful Revolution in 1989, gave its idea of resistance to the Arab Spring in 2011, and is inherited by the Occupy movement and for example “A Punk Prayer” by Pussy Riot. Many resistant political, religious and arts movements and mobilisations imagined an open, radical democratic and solidary society not only beyond the existing socialism but also beyond capitalism and its limited democracy. These activists showed new performances and alliances between secular and religious women’s, peace and environmental movements and not least the ecumenical process. Because the experience and the concepts of Eastern-European dissidence are almost not present in postcolonial, post-secular and queer theoretical and theological debates as well as in the current applications as for example the political and cultural self-imagination of Europe or in extended ideas of collectivity like new assemblages, they are elaborated on here.
