Ir-Religious MAsculinities: Unpacking the gendered dialectic between Islam and secularism

IRMA breaks new ground and proposes an innovative approach for the relational study of gender by investigating the relationship between masculinity, secularism and religiosity among Bangladeshi-origin Muslim men in different national contexts.

An ideological tension between secularism and Islam plays a prominent role in the societal debate on gender, not only in Europe, where ""Muslim men"" are often a cause for concern, but also in Muslim-majority countries that experienced conflicts between secular state and political Islam, such as Bangladesh.

This tension leads most men to frame their identifications according to a polarity between Islam and secularism, and to conceive of their own masculinity as incompatible with that of their counterparts, provoking heated controversy on issues such as gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights, and posing a challenge that has found little response in academic research.

Scholars have so far paid scant attention to the topic, producing poor empirical data, and rather devoting themselves to studying ""Islamic men"" as if they constitute a separate reality from the rest of society.

In addition, the scarce research does not consider how migration impacts conceptions of secularism, Islam, and masculinities.

IRMA remedies these shortcomings with a multi-sited ethnography on the relationship between secular (irreligious) and Islam-inspired (religious) masculinities in Bangladesh and among Bangladeshi migrants in Italy and Switzerland.

The project investigates gender, secularism and religiosity in their interaction with socio-political determinants such as social class and sexual orientation, and with the position of social actors in the geographies of power, in order to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the complex and shifting interplay between secularism, religion and masculinities, and a non-ethnocentric understanding of how secularism and religiosity connect to gender equality and the rights of nonconforming people.