Must God be dead in Swedish feminist research?

Abstract: The thesis has two aims. Firstly, to explore and challenge the secularist tradition in Swedish gender studies, as well as, the secularist ideology in the conceptualisation and treatment of religious topics and subject positions. This aim springs out of the need for knowledge production processes that do not structurally erase the voices of peripheralized bodies and minds in a secularised structure, and the necessity of not centring around the values and conception of the world framed through a narrow western secular middle-class male subject position. This will be operationalized through an exploration of the inclusion and exclusion of religion and spirituality in two Scandinavian academic feminist journals. The analysis of the empirical material shows a selective representation of religious topics as either othered or peripheralised. The second aim regards the naturalisation of a specific dominant repetition mentioned in the journals; the normalised conviction of the Christian God as necessarily masculine. This works as a productive consequence of the first aim of the thesis, the unveiling of normalisations, as well as, the example fortifies the unquestioned and veiled secularity within academia. Thus, the thesis is working towards dismantling anti-religious traces and prejudices of religious and spiritual notions within knowledge production in Swedish gender studies.