Between Legal and Non-legal Terrains: Religious Nationalisms and Racialized Women Immigrants in the United States
摘要
The global emergence of religious nationalism—or nationalist ideologies shaped by religious dogmatism—in recent years has intensified the marginality of women, racial minorities, and immigrants. In the United States (henceforth, the US), political discourses and judicial institutions have legitimized white Christian nationalist efforts to restrict women’s bodily autonomy (by overturning Roe v Wade, for instance). The same institutions have continued to criminalize and racialize immigrants. In this chapter, we present a meta-analysis of our findings from multiple projects about Hindu Indian women in the US (first- and second-generation immigrants). We choose this group to understand how they navigate the hegemonic forces of Christian nationalism in the US, as well as the nationalist version of their own religion—or, Hindutva. The recent surge of Hindutva in India and in the Indian diaspora in the US—that also marginalizes women—complicates these women’s reclamation of gendered agency through religion. We focus on the legal and non-legal terrains—including unregulated digital spaces—where religious nationalism flourishes. Interactions in these legal and non-legal spaces shape Hindu Indian women’s transnational identities and experiences in the US. We also show how religious nationalism both castigates and coopts secularism in liberal democracies. However, we remain vigilant of the ways in which Western models of nationalism had been historically exclusionary, and therefore, it is easily weaponized by religious-nationalist groups in our times.