Aktioner och reaktioner - Kristna kvinnors motreaktioner till Femens aktioner i en proteströrelse på internet

Abstract

Religion is not only manifested in the more traditional forms such as church attendance, but also in various expressions on social media. Facebook is seen by many as creating a social platform where different opinions and more unconventional discussions may flourish unlike how the traditional media convey information. Internet is therefore an interesting platform for investigating how information about religion is spread by researching religious behavior and expression. The focus of this essay is to examine visible, which includes text as a social practice, forms of religious expression shown by the discursive struggle between the Facebook-group Christian Women Against Femen and its counterpart feminist movement Femen. The essay seeks to answer how notions of femininity on the Internet are formulated and reproduced based on the discourse between these two women's movements. The essay highlights how the women’s movements, with their bodily manifestation and by their usage of words, construct and reproduce different images of gender and womanhood. Femen’s method of performing action is to provoke and liberate women from the masculine structures of power thus including the church as such an institution. The struggle appears when Christian Women Against Femen aspire to maintain the ideal image of womanhood based on traditional Christian values which they manifest by posting protest pictures on the wall of the Facebook-group. More interesting is that the Christian women contextualize themselves with nationalistic and patriotic right-wing parties’ offline who usually strive to sustain a patriarchal state structure. The level of demonizing the other extends to sustain a dichotomy between the movements which upholds the separation of private/public.