This panel brings together global perspectives on women’s negotiations of freedom within religious, cultural, and political contexts. From Türkiye to Tibet, Kenya to Korea, and diaspora communities in China, these papers examine how women navigate systems of power and tradition, transforming spaces of constraint into sites of resilience and liberation. Topics include women’s spatial practices in Turkish mosques, feminist responses to femicide in Kenya, and Jewish women's ritual creativity in Harbin’s diaspora. A study of Korean comfort women through poetry interrogates the limits of political liberation, while contemporary Tibetan nuns offer a non-Western vision of liberatory complementarianism rooted in compassion and motherhood. Collectively, these papers challenge static notions of freedom, illuminating how women reinterpret faith, identity, and agency across shifting socio-religious landscapes. Through lived practices, cultural memory, and theological innovation, the panel reveals how freedom is not given, but continuously woven through acts of resistance, imagination, and communal care.
Who “owns” mosques in Türkiye is a layered question, particularly regarding women’s varied roles and experiences. While mosque architecture often reflects male-centered frameworks, women’s relationships with these spaces are not uniform. Some see mosques as central to worship and social engagement; others avoid them for cultural or personal reasons. KADEM’s “Camiler Hepimizin” (“Mosques Belong to All of Us”) project evaluates “women-friendly” features quantitatively but does not capture women’s subjective perceptions. This paper compares two contrasting examples in Istanbul—the Fatih Hafız Ahmet Paşa Mosque (low score) and the Üsküdar Valide Cedid Mosque (high score)—to explore how women negotiate mosque spaces in practice. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s tactics, Edward Soja’s Thirdspace, and Doreen Massey’s power-geometry, I investigate how women engage, transform, or bypass these environments. Addressing the conference theme of “freedom,” this study reveals how “counter-hegemonic” spatial practices emerge, ultimately reshaping notions of worship, belonging, and spatial justice.
In the first three months of 2024, Kenya reported 97 femicide cases, adding to over 500 intimate partner femicides recorded between 2016 and 2023. This alarming trend has spurred the Kenyan feminist movement to demand action, leading to protests and the establishment of a 42-member government taskforce to address gender-based violence. Feminists are challenging religious and cultural norms that perpetuate patriarchal structures, often trapping women in cycles of abuse and denying them freedom. This paper explores the complex interplay between love, freedom, and systemic gender-based violence, analyzing femicide cases and feminist responses. It highlights how Kenyan women are resisting oppression, advocating for systemic change, and redefining love and freedom to prioritize safety, equality, and autonomy. Using a feminist lens, the paper critiques entrenched ideologies and calls for religious and cultural institutions to reinterpret freedom and love in ways that promote gender justice, emphasizing consent, autonomy, and mutual respect in relationships.
This paper explores how Jewish women in Harbin, China (1898–1950), negotiated freedom within a self-governing diaspora community on a multi-ethnic frontier. Preserving Jewish identity amid Russian, Chinese, and Japanese influences, they defied historical constraints—displacement from pogroms, Japanese occupation—often underexplored by scholars emphasizing men’s contributions to economic and public life. Drawing on local archival sources—diaries, memoirs, and pictures—and comparisons with other diaspora communities, this research underscores their negotiated freedom as a model with contemporary relevance for multi-ethnic religious contexts. I argue that Jewish women secured freedom through education and ritual, blending biblical traditions with local practices—schools merging Jewish and Russian learning, Passover seders with Chinese elements. This process, termed “diasporic midrash,” a lived reinterpretation of tradition, sustained Jewishness without rabbinic authority, shaping Harbin’s cultural fabric. Their pragmatic freedom anchored resilience, offering a regional feminist lens on gender and religious identity with lasting resonance.
Complementarianism, a Christian and post-Christian understanding of gender in which men and women are understood to have intrinsically different bodies and characteristics that “complement” one another, is generally understood by western feminists as a discourse of patriarchal oppression. However, in this paper, the authors drawn on an indigenous theory of gender proposed by a group of learned nuns in contemporary Tibet to argue that the association between patriarchy and complementarianism is not universal, and should not be mapped onto non-western and non-Christian contexts. Rather, the Tibetan nuns’ theory of complementarian gender roles, working in tandem with a shrewd interpretation of the lived identity of motherhood as sources of liberative compassion, serves as a localized argument for gender equality in contemporary Tibetan Buddhism.
This study explores how Korean women experienced freedom and liberation during and after the Japanese colonial period through the poem 어머님 말씀 (Ŏmŏnim Malssŭm), meaning ‘Mother’s Words,’ by Korean poet Gunho Kim. Based on stories passed down from his mother, the poem is one of the earliest literary works to address the suffering of Korean comfort women. The poem not only emphasizes political liberation but also conveys a deeper longing for true freedom from oppression.
Based on the poem, this research interrogates whether political liberation led to genuine freedom or if oppression continued to manifest. It also examines how the historical experiences of Korean women shaped their identity, spirituality, and acts of resistance. This study offers fresh insights into the ongoing struggle for freedom and justice among Korean women, aiming to contribute to a broader understanding of women’s rights, resistance, and the enduring impact of historical trauma.