Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IRMA (Ir-Religious MAsculinities: Unpacking the gendered dialectic between Islam and secularism)
Reporting period: 2024-09-01 to 2026-08-31
Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project
A tension between secularism and Islam is prominent in societal debate on gender in several Christian-majority European countries, and ignites controversy posing to academic research a serious challenge that has so far found little response. An ideological contrast between a supposedly “modern” and secular West respectful of gendered rights, and a “backward” and “patriarchal” Islam, creates a “sexual clash of civilisations” which finds expression, among other ways, in concerns about “Islamic men,” considered by sectors of public opinion to be incompatible with allegedly non-patriarchal secular models of masculinity. These issues are clearly central to the public debate in Europe, where the politicisation of immigration, the growing popularity of the far right, the persistence of Islamophobia, and the emergence of forms of ‘femonationalism’ that co-opt elements of feminist thought in order to stigmatise Muslim men and women and exclude them from public life, make it more urgent than ever – both scientifically and socially – to dismantle a series of Eurocentric narratives based on the supposed superiority of secularism and on the supposed rejection of patriarchal models by Western populations.
Far less known is the fact that a tension between secular and Islamic masculinities is also pivotal in some Muslim-majority countries, especially in those that experienced a sharp contrast between state secularism and political Islam. IRMA focuses on a country where this opposition takes its fiercest tones, Bangladesh, with a multi-sited ethnographic research on the impact of the dialectic secularism-religion on the gendered identifications of Bangladeshi Muslim men in their homeland and in diasporic contexts. The birth of Bangladesh in 1971 was marked by a fierce conflict between a secular pro-independence bloc and the main Islamic political outfits that sided with Pakistan. This wound remains open to this day, and still informs a political scenario in which the secularism-Islam nexus is boiled down to a violent dialectic between assertive state secularism and Islamic radicalism. This tension was further exacerbated by the student uprising of July 2024, which led to the fall of an authoritarian government inspired by normative secularism, prompting a widespread identification of secularism with authoritarianism, and fuelling an unprecedented rise in both Islamic parties and Islamic student movements. This scenario reverberates in the models employed by Bangladeshi men, digging sometimes a furrow between “secular” and “Islamic men.”
IRMA investigates how these different ways of being a man are experienced by social actors, trying to understand whether there really is a substantial difference between gendered identitifications inspired by Islam and those that emphasise adherence to the cultural project of secularism, or whether the polarised representations offered by the media and certain political groups might in fact conceal a reality in which people interweave elements drawn from both secular and religious traditions, evoking post-secular scenarios and enacting gender performances that are largely situational. To this end, the research focuses not only on factors of differentiation but also on the overlaps and common roots of gender-related representations among people who identify as religious and those who describe themselves as secular, with a particular interest in the presence of elements of patriarchal culture both in the genealogy of religious thought and in that of reflection on secularism.
The research also presents a specific focus on the variations in the relationship between secularism and Islam in different societal scenarios. For this reason, the project involves ethnography in three fields: Bangladesh, and Bangladeshi communities in Italy and Switzerland, two countries with different interpretations of the relationship state secularism-Islam.
IRMA breaks a new ground for the relational study of gender; the project is the first systematic inquiry on the subject of religious and secular masculinities, and addresses the paucity of empirical data available and the insufficient development of academic reflection. It is also the first research on how the interplay between secularism, religiosity and masculinities varies according to the dynamics of mobility, that is, in different constellations of power; in addition, it addresses the absence of studies on religious and secular masculinities on Bangladesh and its diaspora. IRMA rectifies the exceptionalism characterising research on “Islamic masculinities” by contextualising them within their constitutive relationship with secular masculinities. In addition, it opens up a new subfield of inquiry related to the category of “secular masculinity,” which, in the limited literature available, is often referred to without a clear definition being provided and without any systematic studies having been carried out.
Furthermore, IRMA aims at enhancing tolerance and the rights of the religious minorities, and addresses the EU global challenge of Gender Equality, through a focus on gendered rights, including those of LGBTQIA+ people. The project systematises and enhances knowledge on religious and secular masculinities, proposing their concurrent and relational study as an approach capable of accounting for the processes of co-constitution that bind them together, and for the polysemicity of the gendered relations between religiosity and secularism, replacing ideological and ethnocentric representations with scientifically grounded innovative views.
The three main objectives of the research are:
O1. To analyse, adopting the lens of spatial intersectionality, masculinities, secularism and religion in their interactions with socio-political determinants such as social class and sexual orientation, and with the dynamics of im-mobility.
O2. To propose, based on the concrete case of secular and Islamic masculinities, the relational study of masculinities as an innovative method for studying gender, in order to foster theoretical debate around the relational and context-dependent character of gender, religion and secularism.
O3. to promote an evidence-driven, unbiased and non-ethnocentric understanding of the relationship between Islam, secularism and gendered rights, by stimulating a discussion both in the universities involved and in civil society through dissemination and communication activities.
Far less known is the fact that a tension between secular and Islamic masculinities is also pivotal in some Muslim-majority countries, especially in those that experienced a sharp contrast between state secularism and political Islam. IRMA focuses on a country where this opposition takes its fiercest tones, Bangladesh, with a multi-sited ethnographic research on the impact of the dialectic secularism-religion on the gendered identifications of Bangladeshi Muslim men in their homeland and in diasporic contexts. The birth of Bangladesh in 1971 was marked by a fierce conflict between a secular pro-independence bloc and the main Islamic political outfits that sided with Pakistan. This wound remains open to this day, and still informs a political scenario in which the secularism-Islam nexus is boiled down to a violent dialectic between assertive state secularism and Islamic radicalism. This tension was further exacerbated by the student uprising of July 2024, which led to the fall of an authoritarian government inspired by normative secularism, prompting a widespread identification of secularism with authoritarianism, and fuelling an unprecedented rise in both Islamic parties and Islamic student movements. This scenario reverberates in the models employed by Bangladeshi men, digging sometimes a furrow between “secular” and “Islamic men.”
IRMA investigates how these different ways of being a man are experienced by social actors, trying to understand whether there really is a substantial difference between gendered identitifications inspired by Islam and those that emphasise adherence to the cultural project of secularism, or whether the polarised representations offered by the media and certain political groups might in fact conceal a reality in which people interweave elements drawn from both secular and religious traditions, evoking post-secular scenarios and enacting gender performances that are largely situational. To this end, the research focuses not only on factors of differentiation but also on the overlaps and common roots of gender-related representations among people who identify as religious and those who describe themselves as secular, with a particular interest in the presence of elements of patriarchal culture both in the genealogy of religious thought and in that of reflection on secularism.
The research also presents a specific focus on the variations in the relationship between secularism and Islam in different societal scenarios. For this reason, the project involves ethnography in three fields: Bangladesh, and Bangladeshi communities in Italy and Switzerland, two countries with different interpretations of the relationship state secularism-Islam.
IRMA breaks a new ground for the relational study of gender; the project is the first systematic inquiry on the subject of religious and secular masculinities, and addresses the paucity of empirical data available and the insufficient development of academic reflection. It is also the first research on how the interplay between secularism, religiosity and masculinities varies according to the dynamics of mobility, that is, in different constellations of power; in addition, it addresses the absence of studies on religious and secular masculinities on Bangladesh and its diaspora. IRMA rectifies the exceptionalism characterising research on “Islamic masculinities” by contextualising them within their constitutive relationship with secular masculinities. In addition, it opens up a new subfield of inquiry related to the category of “secular masculinity,” which, in the limited literature available, is often referred to without a clear definition being provided and without any systematic studies having been carried out.
Furthermore, IRMA aims at enhancing tolerance and the rights of the religious minorities, and addresses the EU global challenge of Gender Equality, through a focus on gendered rights, including those of LGBTQIA+ people. The project systematises and enhances knowledge on religious and secular masculinities, proposing their concurrent and relational study as an approach capable of accounting for the processes of co-constitution that bind them together, and for the polysemicity of the gendered relations between religiosity and secularism, replacing ideological and ethnocentric representations with scientifically grounded innovative views.
The three main objectives of the research are:
O1. To analyse, adopting the lens of spatial intersectionality, masculinities, secularism and religion in their interactions with socio-political determinants such as social class and sexual orientation, and with the dynamics of im-mobility.
O2. To propose, based on the concrete case of secular and Islamic masculinities, the relational study of masculinities as an innovative method for studying gender, in order to foster theoretical debate around the relational and context-dependent character of gender, religion and secularism.
O3. to promote an evidence-driven, unbiased and non-ethnocentric understanding of the relationship between Islam, secularism and gendered rights, by stimulating a discussion both in the universities involved and in civil society through dissemination and communication activities.
Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far
At month 24 of the project’s total 36-month duration, the IRMA project’s activities have led to the following achievements:
1) Completion of a literature review covering the anthropology of science, critical secularism studies, multiple secularities and post-secularism, studies on masculinity and in particular on ‘Islamic masculinities’, Muslim and Islamic feminism, transnational feminism, public Islam, postcolonial perspectives on religion, and transgender studies.
The literature review allowed the researcher to refine a theoretical approach to the study of the gendered dialectic between secularism and Islam, based on the concept of ‘symmetrical anthropology’, adapted from the anthropology of science (Bruno Latour). This approach consists of applying the same analytical categories and posing the same research questions to both expressions of religiosity and cultural manifestations perceived as secular, and is proving productive both in the analysis of first-hand data and in the re-examination of secondary sources. The review has also made it possible to identify tools aimed at a thick comparison between gender performances inspired by religion and those inspired by secularism (e.g. the relational definition of ‘hegemonic masculinity’), to problematise the local shifts in the meanings associated with the concepts of secularism and religiosity, thanks to the approaches of ‘spatial intersectionality’ and ‘multiple secularities’, and to contextualise the study of masculinities within a critical and non-binary perspective on the construction of gender identities in Bangladesh and the so-called Muslim world.
2) Completion of ethnographic research in the three countries involved in the project, namely Bangladesh, Italy and Switzerland.
The fieldwork involved the following methods for data collection:
a) Semi-structured interviews
By the end of month 24, 71 semi-structured interviews had been conducted, of which 9 were in Switzerland, 43 in Bangladesh and 19 in Italy. The method for recruiting interviewees was based on the mediation of gatekeepers with whom there were existing research relationships, on the mediation of a number of organisations (e.g. migrant organisations or political groups), and on the snowball sampling technique.
b) Participant observation and informal conversations
Participant observation was extensively carried out in all the three countries. The findings from these activities were meticulously recorded in ethnographic notes; at present, these notes comprise a ‘field diary’ of approximately 90,000 words.
In Bangladesh, the main settings in which participant observation and informal conversations were carried out were an association which defends the rights of ‘gender-diverse’ people in Dhaka, and the election committee of an independent candidate in Narayanganj. The North South University campus was also a key location for observation and informal interactions. In Narayanganj, the existence of long-standing research relationships also gave access to the private spaces of certain households and to places typically associated with male socialising, such as tea rooms and private clubs.
In Italy participant observation and informal interactions took place mainly within the activities of migrant associations, in informal prayer rooms run by Bangladeshi migrants, and in public spaces during cultural festivals or protest events in Rome. In Venice, the researcher's engagement with the City of Venice’s local immigration services and with the local branch of Emergency proved crucial for meeting people from Bangladesh and observing interactions within institutional settings.
In Switzerland participant observation took place in two associations of Bangladeshi migrants based in Geneva, in cultural events, in shops run by people originally from Bangladesh, and the private homes of some of the research participants in Lausanne and Geneva.
c) Analysis of written and audiovisual material, both online and offline
The research also involved analysing the content of the social media accounts of the organisations mentioned above, watching films and documentaries and reading literary works suggested by the interviewees to illustrate their views and models of masculinity.
Overall, the research activities enabled interaction with a wide range of people, including not only cis men, but also trans men, trans and cis women, and non-binary people. Furthermore, the research enabled interaction with people of different sexual orientations. In this way, the ethnographic work made it possible to collect data on under-researched social groups and to gain access to perspectives on the relationship between gender, religion and secularism which offer viewpoints that are under-represented in the scientific literature.
1) Completion of a literature review covering the anthropology of science, critical secularism studies, multiple secularities and post-secularism, studies on masculinity and in particular on ‘Islamic masculinities’, Muslim and Islamic feminism, transnational feminism, public Islam, postcolonial perspectives on religion, and transgender studies.
The literature review allowed the researcher to refine a theoretical approach to the study of the gendered dialectic between secularism and Islam, based on the concept of ‘symmetrical anthropology’, adapted from the anthropology of science (Bruno Latour). This approach consists of applying the same analytical categories and posing the same research questions to both expressions of religiosity and cultural manifestations perceived as secular, and is proving productive both in the analysis of first-hand data and in the re-examination of secondary sources. The review has also made it possible to identify tools aimed at a thick comparison between gender performances inspired by religion and those inspired by secularism (e.g. the relational definition of ‘hegemonic masculinity’), to problematise the local shifts in the meanings associated with the concepts of secularism and religiosity, thanks to the approaches of ‘spatial intersectionality’ and ‘multiple secularities’, and to contextualise the study of masculinities within a critical and non-binary perspective on the construction of gender identities in Bangladesh and the so-called Muslim world.
2) Completion of ethnographic research in the three countries involved in the project, namely Bangladesh, Italy and Switzerland.
The fieldwork involved the following methods for data collection:
a) Semi-structured interviews
By the end of month 24, 71 semi-structured interviews had been conducted, of which 9 were in Switzerland, 43 in Bangladesh and 19 in Italy. The method for recruiting interviewees was based on the mediation of gatekeepers with whom there were existing research relationships, on the mediation of a number of organisations (e.g. migrant organisations or political groups), and on the snowball sampling technique.
b) Participant observation and informal conversations
Participant observation was extensively carried out in all the three countries. The findings from these activities were meticulously recorded in ethnographic notes; at present, these notes comprise a ‘field diary’ of approximately 90,000 words.
In Bangladesh, the main settings in which participant observation and informal conversations were carried out were an association which defends the rights of ‘gender-diverse’ people in Dhaka, and the election committee of an independent candidate in Narayanganj. The North South University campus was also a key location for observation and informal interactions. In Narayanganj, the existence of long-standing research relationships also gave access to the private spaces of certain households and to places typically associated with male socialising, such as tea rooms and private clubs.
In Italy participant observation and informal interactions took place mainly within the activities of migrant associations, in informal prayer rooms run by Bangladeshi migrants, and in public spaces during cultural festivals or protest events in Rome. In Venice, the researcher's engagement with the City of Venice’s local immigration services and with the local branch of Emergency proved crucial for meeting people from Bangladesh and observing interactions within institutional settings.
In Switzerland participant observation took place in two associations of Bangladeshi migrants based in Geneva, in cultural events, in shops run by people originally from Bangladesh, and the private homes of some of the research participants in Lausanne and Geneva.
c) Analysis of written and audiovisual material, both online and offline
The research also involved analysing the content of the social media accounts of the organisations mentioned above, watching films and documentaries and reading literary works suggested by the interviewees to illustrate their views and models of masculinity.
Overall, the research activities enabled interaction with a wide range of people, including not only cis men, but also trans men, trans and cis women, and non-binary people. Furthermore, the research enabled interaction with people of different sexual orientations. In this way, the ethnographic work made it possible to collect data on under-researched social groups and to gain access to perspectives on the relationship between gender, religion and secularism which offer viewpoints that are under-represented in the scientific literature.
Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)
The analysis of the data collected, which is still ongoing at month 24, has so far yielded the following results that go beyond the current state of the art.
1) A critical examination of the representations of Islamic and secular masculinities prevalent in the scientific literature, based on the following evidence:
1a) The idea that secular and religious masculinities differ sharply from one another is not directly supported by the analysis of the data. Rather, the analysis shows that there are a large number of men who do not define themselves as either secular or religious, or who, whilst defining themselves in one of these two ways, do not believe that there are irreconcilable differences with the other group. Furthermore, even men who define themselves as secular or religious, and who believe themselves to be profoundly (and irreconcilably) different from their counterparts, have been shown to share a common core of traditionalist and, ultimately, conservative views on masculinity and gender relations, which in many cases confirm the basic features of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. The research frames these overlaps by coining the term ‘overlapping patriarchal consensus’, based on John Rawls’s concept of ‘overlapping consensus’.
1b) The analysis has made it possible to recognise the attitude of interlocutors offering highly polarised representations of secular and Islam-inspired masculinities as a form of strategic essentialism fuelled by the politicisation of the secularism-Islam dialectic, not only in Bangladesh but also in Europe. It is significant that the evidence shows a positive correlation between the level of political engagement and the tendency to offer polarised representations. This finding represents a novel contribution to the current state of the art, since in the literature available on the subject, the views of those who offer polarised representations are seldom problematised, that is, traced back to the specific socio-political positionality from which they are conceived and articulated; there is therefore a tendency to confuse the representations of reality offered by the interviewees with the ‘overall’ reality they experience. The use of an intersectional lens has proved fundamental in reaching these conclusions, highlighting that the absence of intersectional approaches represents a significant gap in the available academic literature on the research topics.
1c) The research has made it possible to break down the monolithic image of ‘Islamic masculinity’ portrayed in much of the literature. The relationship between masculinity and religious repertoires has proved to be far more flexible than is usually described; it is interpreted by the interviewees in ways that differ considerably from one another, which significantly blurs the image of strict orthodoxy associated with ‘Islamic masculinity’. The research has shown that the choice of sample can considerably influence the results obtained, insofar as it was primarily the data collected from non-cis, non-heterosexual, or moderately religious participants that enabled these conclusions to be reached. This highlighted that the selection of a sample composed almost exclusively of cis-heterosexual men who are also ‘Islamic activists’ (a feature of the majority of studies on the relationship between masculinity and Islam) constitutes an obstacle to research. The practice of multi-sited ethnography and the related approach of spatial intersectionality have also helped to bring these findings to light, insofar as they have enabled the observation of different manifestations of religiously inspired masculinities, which depend on geographical contexts and the shifts in power relations that these entail.
1d) For this reason, one of the outcomes of the research is to propose that the term ‘Islamic masculinity’ be abandoned in favour of a more inclusive and less politically charged term such as ‘Muslim masculinities’ (in the plural form), reserving the term ‘Islamic masculinities’ exclusively for the gender performances of men who strictly adhere to an orthodox and militant form of Islam.
1e) Similarly to what was observed regarding so-called ‘Islamic masculinities’, the monolithic image that the literature usually associates with secular masculinities has also been nuanced in the course of the study. The fact that the evidence revealed an ‘overlapping patriarchal consensus’ between the two different models of masculinity led to a simultaneous deconstruction of a series of automatic associations between secular masculinities on the one hand, and concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘feminism’, ‘gender equality’ or ‘tolerance’ on the other. Furthermore, contextualising the evidence gathered during the research within the body of literature that employs the category of ‘secular masculinity’ shows that the aforementioned associations do not constitute cultural invariants. On the contrary, the available literature demonstrates that, although secular masculinities appear in many contexts to be linked to a ‘moral narrative of modernity’ (Webb Keane), there are instances in which they are mobilised in opposition to processes of modernisation.
1f) Consequently, the research has led to a scientific definition of the concept of secular masculinity that takes this variability into account, and which follows the relational definition of secularism and religion as two concepts that are opposed to each other and define one another: ‘secular masculinity’ is a gendered identification that emphasises a detachment from religion (limiting its sphere of influence in political life, relegating religion to the personal sphere, etc.), or its complete absence. Associating ‘secular masculinity’ with further fixed and defined characteristics, as some of the literature indirectly does, represents, in this sense, an arbitrary act that extends to ‘the rest of the population’ conceptions that are hegemonic and/or typical of the West, or specific to a presumed majority, or simply correlated with the positional characteristics of the sample selected for the research, similarly to what occurs with Islamic masculinities.
2) IRMA has also helped to decolonise ideas that are widely used in the current state of the art. Both the literature review and the ethnographic data collected during the study have shown that concepts such as ‘patriarchy’, ‘patriarchal culture’ and the very representations of gender-based violence are heavily influenced by a colonial bias, that is by a moral narrative of modernity that associates these elements with the non-Western world (and with religion), thereby producing a parallel self-absolution of the West (and its supposed programmatic secularism). An analysis of secondary sources, particularly from a historical and genealogical perspective, has shown just how close the relationship between the secular culture of the Western world and patriarchal culture actually is, illustrating the extent to which the scapegoating of non-Western men (and Muslim men in particular) contributes to rendering the gender-based violence practised in and by the West invisible. In terms of ethnographic research, engagement with Muslim people, particularly cis-heterosexual women, who appropriate feminism from counter-intuitive perspectives by challenging the Western, individualistic concept of ‘freedom’ and the idea of ‘gender equality’ (often proposing a focus not on ‘equality’ but on ‘gender equity’), together with the emergence of forms of women’s empowerment closely linked to religion, has likewise served to nuance a range of hegemonic representations not only at a societal level but also in academic literature, contributing to a decolonisation of the concept of patriarchy and to a less prejudicial view of gender-based violence both in non-Western contexts and in European migrant contexts.
3) The research also highlighted the need to examine the political dialectic between secularism and religion, and its repercussions on models of masculinity and femininity, from a diachronic perspective. An analysis of secondary sources has revealed historical shifts in this dialectic in both Western and non-Western contexts, including analyses of current political affairs, which show an unexpected resurgence of religion in the Western world, and important shifts in the debate on gender relations manifesting not only in further stigmatisation of Muslim people but also in a widespread resurgence of hostility towards transgender people. Some of these shifts, which strongly corroborate the analyses provided by scholars such as Talal Asad, are also reflected in the ethnographic data collected during the research. In particular, having carried out preliminary research on the subject over a period of almost twenty years has made it possible to observe how the attitudes and opinions of some interlocutors have changed over time, particularly following the uprising of July 2024 in Bangladesh. A comparison between the data collected during the first 24 months of the IRMA project and preliminary research has shown that many people have either abandoned the normative secularism they espoused prior to the fall of the secularist government, or have adopted attitudes of dissimulation, or have begun to blend religious and secular repertoires in their representations of gender, or have even embraced Islam to varying degrees. The need to provide the study of the relationship between secularism, religion and gender with a historical frame of reference also reinforces another of the project’s results beyond the state of the art, namely the deconstruction of static and crystallised representations of Muslim masculinities and those inspired by secularism.
4) The research has made it possible to develop a more rigorous method for the relational study of gender identifications, using Gregory Bateson’s concept of ‘schismogenesis’ as the basis for an analysis of the dialectic secular and Muslim masculinities. From this perspective, the characteristics of secular and Muslim masculinities can be interpreted not merely as the outcome of endogenous processes, that is, as separate and mutually impermeable developments of the two models, but as the result of a foundational relationship that gives rise to reactive behavioural and discursive patterns, patterns that are at once symmetrical and complementary. This ambivalent relationship implies the coexistence of processes of convergence (e.g. overlapping patriarchal consensus, the borrowing of ideas between the two fields) and of differentiation (polarisation of opinions, narratives of mutual irreconcilability). This line of reflection is proving valuable not only in the analysis of data from the ongoing research, but also in the re-examination of secondary sources (e.g. the literature on hybrid masculinities), demonstrating that it constitutes an approach that can be applied not only to the specific case under investigation, but also to research on the formation of gendered identifications in general.
5) IRMA is producing results that go beyond the state of the art also in terms of the societal impact of the research. The project proposes a multi-sited, anti-reductionist and intersectional analysis of the relationship between religion, secularism and gender, which provides an indispensable foundation for constructing alternative narratives to those offered by ‘femonationalisms’ and the rhetoric of the ‘sexual clash of civilisations’, and for developing tools that can be utilised by both decision-makers and civil society. To date, the project’s activities have involved the launch of a process of knowledge transfer to civil society, with particular reference to public services dedicated to immigration (Venice City Council) and to organisations engaged in assisting migrants and combating gender-based violence (Acmos, Emergency, ‘anti-violence centres’). During these activities, social workers, public service managers, volunteers and teachers have been provided with innovative tools and knowledge aimed at making their work more effective, namely:
5a) Tools and knowledge for the intersectional analysis of conflicts in settings characterised by a significant migrant presence, aimed at correctly framing conflicts that arise in situations where different marginalised groups (e.g. people with a migrant background and queer people) find themselves interacting. This approach enables social workers and practitioners to take into account the different axes of domination and the different levels of power relations involved in these conflicts.
5b) Tools and knowledge designed to counter the ‘Islamic exceptionalism’ approach within third sector organisations and public services dedicated to immigration. This knowledge transfer addresses the urgent need, identified during ethnographic research, to adopt a more nuanced perspective amongst social workers, who often tend to reduce the analysis of intra-family conflicts and cases of gender-based violence to the influence of Islam. The project’s activities have proposed protocols that take into account additional positionalities and people’s actual living conditions, with a view to enhancing the capacity to address such situations.
5c) Knowledge relating to the debate on gender issues in Muslim-majority countries, including knowledge of Muslim and Islamic feminisms, aimed at facilitating the development of a common language with service users when dealing with cases of gender-based violence, and at fostering processes of cultural mediation concerning different conceptions of gender-based violence and the division of productive and reproductive labour between men and women.
5d) Knowledge of the situation of queer Muslims in migrant settings and in Muslim-majority countries, designed to facilitate the identification of problematic situations within migrant populations and the development of intervention protocols that differ from those used by social services with cis-heterosexual migrants, taking into account the varying degrees of integration within the relevant ‘community’ and the differing levels of accessibility to essential services for marginalised groups.
1) A critical examination of the representations of Islamic and secular masculinities prevalent in the scientific literature, based on the following evidence:
1a) The idea that secular and religious masculinities differ sharply from one another is not directly supported by the analysis of the data. Rather, the analysis shows that there are a large number of men who do not define themselves as either secular or religious, or who, whilst defining themselves in one of these two ways, do not believe that there are irreconcilable differences with the other group. Furthermore, even men who define themselves as secular or religious, and who believe themselves to be profoundly (and irreconcilably) different from their counterparts, have been shown to share a common core of traditionalist and, ultimately, conservative views on masculinity and gender relations, which in many cases confirm the basic features of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. The research frames these overlaps by coining the term ‘overlapping patriarchal consensus’, based on John Rawls’s concept of ‘overlapping consensus’.
1b) The analysis has made it possible to recognise the attitude of interlocutors offering highly polarised representations of secular and Islam-inspired masculinities as a form of strategic essentialism fuelled by the politicisation of the secularism-Islam dialectic, not only in Bangladesh but also in Europe. It is significant that the evidence shows a positive correlation between the level of political engagement and the tendency to offer polarised representations. This finding represents a novel contribution to the current state of the art, since in the literature available on the subject, the views of those who offer polarised representations are seldom problematised, that is, traced back to the specific socio-political positionality from which they are conceived and articulated; there is therefore a tendency to confuse the representations of reality offered by the interviewees with the ‘overall’ reality they experience. The use of an intersectional lens has proved fundamental in reaching these conclusions, highlighting that the absence of intersectional approaches represents a significant gap in the available academic literature on the research topics.
1c) The research has made it possible to break down the monolithic image of ‘Islamic masculinity’ portrayed in much of the literature. The relationship between masculinity and religious repertoires has proved to be far more flexible than is usually described; it is interpreted by the interviewees in ways that differ considerably from one another, which significantly blurs the image of strict orthodoxy associated with ‘Islamic masculinity’. The research has shown that the choice of sample can considerably influence the results obtained, insofar as it was primarily the data collected from non-cis, non-heterosexual, or moderately religious participants that enabled these conclusions to be reached. This highlighted that the selection of a sample composed almost exclusively of cis-heterosexual men who are also ‘Islamic activists’ (a feature of the majority of studies on the relationship between masculinity and Islam) constitutes an obstacle to research. The practice of multi-sited ethnography and the related approach of spatial intersectionality have also helped to bring these findings to light, insofar as they have enabled the observation of different manifestations of religiously inspired masculinities, which depend on geographical contexts and the shifts in power relations that these entail.
1d) For this reason, one of the outcomes of the research is to propose that the term ‘Islamic masculinity’ be abandoned in favour of a more inclusive and less politically charged term such as ‘Muslim masculinities’ (in the plural form), reserving the term ‘Islamic masculinities’ exclusively for the gender performances of men who strictly adhere to an orthodox and militant form of Islam.
1e) Similarly to what was observed regarding so-called ‘Islamic masculinities’, the monolithic image that the literature usually associates with secular masculinities has also been nuanced in the course of the study. The fact that the evidence revealed an ‘overlapping patriarchal consensus’ between the two different models of masculinity led to a simultaneous deconstruction of a series of automatic associations between secular masculinities on the one hand, and concepts such as ‘modernity’, ‘feminism’, ‘gender equality’ or ‘tolerance’ on the other. Furthermore, contextualising the evidence gathered during the research within the body of literature that employs the category of ‘secular masculinity’ shows that the aforementioned associations do not constitute cultural invariants. On the contrary, the available literature demonstrates that, although secular masculinities appear in many contexts to be linked to a ‘moral narrative of modernity’ (Webb Keane), there are instances in which they are mobilised in opposition to processes of modernisation.
1f) Consequently, the research has led to a scientific definition of the concept of secular masculinity that takes this variability into account, and which follows the relational definition of secularism and religion as two concepts that are opposed to each other and define one another: ‘secular masculinity’ is a gendered identification that emphasises a detachment from religion (limiting its sphere of influence in political life, relegating religion to the personal sphere, etc.), or its complete absence. Associating ‘secular masculinity’ with further fixed and defined characteristics, as some of the literature indirectly does, represents, in this sense, an arbitrary act that extends to ‘the rest of the population’ conceptions that are hegemonic and/or typical of the West, or specific to a presumed majority, or simply correlated with the positional characteristics of the sample selected for the research, similarly to what occurs with Islamic masculinities.
2) IRMA has also helped to decolonise ideas that are widely used in the current state of the art. Both the literature review and the ethnographic data collected during the study have shown that concepts such as ‘patriarchy’, ‘patriarchal culture’ and the very representations of gender-based violence are heavily influenced by a colonial bias, that is by a moral narrative of modernity that associates these elements with the non-Western world (and with religion), thereby producing a parallel self-absolution of the West (and its supposed programmatic secularism). An analysis of secondary sources, particularly from a historical and genealogical perspective, has shown just how close the relationship between the secular culture of the Western world and patriarchal culture actually is, illustrating the extent to which the scapegoating of non-Western men (and Muslim men in particular) contributes to rendering the gender-based violence practised in and by the West invisible. In terms of ethnographic research, engagement with Muslim people, particularly cis-heterosexual women, who appropriate feminism from counter-intuitive perspectives by challenging the Western, individualistic concept of ‘freedom’ and the idea of ‘gender equality’ (often proposing a focus not on ‘equality’ but on ‘gender equity’), together with the emergence of forms of women’s empowerment closely linked to religion, has likewise served to nuance a range of hegemonic representations not only at a societal level but also in academic literature, contributing to a decolonisation of the concept of patriarchy and to a less prejudicial view of gender-based violence both in non-Western contexts and in European migrant contexts.
3) The research also highlighted the need to examine the political dialectic between secularism and religion, and its repercussions on models of masculinity and femininity, from a diachronic perspective. An analysis of secondary sources has revealed historical shifts in this dialectic in both Western and non-Western contexts, including analyses of current political affairs, which show an unexpected resurgence of religion in the Western world, and important shifts in the debate on gender relations manifesting not only in further stigmatisation of Muslim people but also in a widespread resurgence of hostility towards transgender people. Some of these shifts, which strongly corroborate the analyses provided by scholars such as Talal Asad, are also reflected in the ethnographic data collected during the research. In particular, having carried out preliminary research on the subject over a period of almost twenty years has made it possible to observe how the attitudes and opinions of some interlocutors have changed over time, particularly following the uprising of July 2024 in Bangladesh. A comparison between the data collected during the first 24 months of the IRMA project and preliminary research has shown that many people have either abandoned the normative secularism they espoused prior to the fall of the secularist government, or have adopted attitudes of dissimulation, or have begun to blend religious and secular repertoires in their representations of gender, or have even embraced Islam to varying degrees. The need to provide the study of the relationship between secularism, religion and gender with a historical frame of reference also reinforces another of the project’s results beyond the state of the art, namely the deconstruction of static and crystallised representations of Muslim masculinities and those inspired by secularism.
4) The research has made it possible to develop a more rigorous method for the relational study of gender identifications, using Gregory Bateson’s concept of ‘schismogenesis’ as the basis for an analysis of the dialectic secular and Muslim masculinities. From this perspective, the characteristics of secular and Muslim masculinities can be interpreted not merely as the outcome of endogenous processes, that is, as separate and mutually impermeable developments of the two models, but as the result of a foundational relationship that gives rise to reactive behavioural and discursive patterns, patterns that are at once symmetrical and complementary. This ambivalent relationship implies the coexistence of processes of convergence (e.g. overlapping patriarchal consensus, the borrowing of ideas between the two fields) and of differentiation (polarisation of opinions, narratives of mutual irreconcilability). This line of reflection is proving valuable not only in the analysis of data from the ongoing research, but also in the re-examination of secondary sources (e.g. the literature on hybrid masculinities), demonstrating that it constitutes an approach that can be applied not only to the specific case under investigation, but also to research on the formation of gendered identifications in general.
5) IRMA is producing results that go beyond the state of the art also in terms of the societal impact of the research. The project proposes a multi-sited, anti-reductionist and intersectional analysis of the relationship between religion, secularism and gender, which provides an indispensable foundation for constructing alternative narratives to those offered by ‘femonationalisms’ and the rhetoric of the ‘sexual clash of civilisations’, and for developing tools that can be utilised by both decision-makers and civil society. To date, the project’s activities have involved the launch of a process of knowledge transfer to civil society, with particular reference to public services dedicated to immigration (Venice City Council) and to organisations engaged in assisting migrants and combating gender-based violence (Acmos, Emergency, ‘anti-violence centres’). During these activities, social workers, public service managers, volunteers and teachers have been provided with innovative tools and knowledge aimed at making their work more effective, namely:
5a) Tools and knowledge for the intersectional analysis of conflicts in settings characterised by a significant migrant presence, aimed at correctly framing conflicts that arise in situations where different marginalised groups (e.g. people with a migrant background and queer people) find themselves interacting. This approach enables social workers and practitioners to take into account the different axes of domination and the different levels of power relations involved in these conflicts.
5b) Tools and knowledge designed to counter the ‘Islamic exceptionalism’ approach within third sector organisations and public services dedicated to immigration. This knowledge transfer addresses the urgent need, identified during ethnographic research, to adopt a more nuanced perspective amongst social workers, who often tend to reduce the analysis of intra-family conflicts and cases of gender-based violence to the influence of Islam. The project’s activities have proposed protocols that take into account additional positionalities and people’s actual living conditions, with a view to enhancing the capacity to address such situations.
5c) Knowledge relating to the debate on gender issues in Muslim-majority countries, including knowledge of Muslim and Islamic feminisms, aimed at facilitating the development of a common language with service users when dealing with cases of gender-based violence, and at fostering processes of cultural mediation concerning different conceptions of gender-based violence and the division of productive and reproductive labour between men and women.
5d) Knowledge of the situation of queer Muslims in migrant settings and in Muslim-majority countries, designed to facilitate the identification of problematic situations within migrant populations and the development of intervention protocols that differ from those used by social services with cis-heterosexual migrants, taking into account the varying degrees of integration within the relevant ‘community’ and the differing levels of accessibility to essential services for marginalised groups.