Gendered and Embodied Un/learning among Women Disengaging from Faith in the UK and Finland

Abstract

Women often embody the central values and practices of their religious trad-ition. When they leave their community, women find a part of the “religious tapestry” remaining with them long after their disengage-ment. In this article, we draw from research in the UK and Finland to explore women’s efforts to unlearn parts of their former religious belong-ing. We draw on in total thirty-five interviews with women who disengaged from the Mormon Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Conservative Laestadianism. We conceptualize un/learning as a multi-layered process consisting of both unlearning and re-learning. We explore women’s narratives about negotiating bodily limits, con-duct and belonging, and understand these as suggesting experiences of a threefold un/learn-ing: gendered, spatial-social and epistemic. We argue that examining gendered and embodied un/learning helps to understand women’s disengagement processes from minority Christian traditions in Western and Northern European secularized contexts such as the UK and Finland.