Scripting Religious and Gender Transformation in the Media

Scripting Religious and Gender Transformation in the Media Mariecke van den Berg (bio) Over the past years, I was involved in two research projects that explored Dutch and Flemish media reporting on two different types of transformation: transgender transition and religious conversion.1 In both cases my colleagues and I noticed the growing excitement over transformation in the media. What is striking, moreover, is a growing fascination for storytelling. It is the personal story, it seems, that makes these transitions intelligible and relatable. In this paper, I bring some of the findings of these projects together in order to demonstrate moments of overlap and difference in how stories of religious and gender transformation are told. I explore the role of storytelling in the mediatization of religious and gender transformations. Where does Western society's hunger for transformation narratives come from? What does it do, what are its discursive effects, which stories are included and which left out, which kinds of transformation and which types of "exness" does society prefer? My main argument is that Western societies like the Netherlands and Belgium want to continuously consume transformation, but only in order, at least for those who live comfortably inside the norms of gender, sexuality, and the secular, to remain unchanged themselves. My own fascination with Dutch and Flemish fascination with transformation comes from a personal investment in current debates on the relation between religion, sexuality, and gender in this context (in particular the Netherlands), into which I was born and to which I still belong. As a Protestant from a sexual minority and as a trained theologian, I participate in ecclesial conversations on the End Page 159 relationship between sexual diversity and Christian traditions, hoping that these conversations will lead to more inclusivity toward feminist and queer perspectives that challenge patriarchal, heteronormative, and cisnormative assumptions. At the same time, as a scholar of religion, I have become more attuned to the way in which secular normativity in western European countries such as the Netherlands often plays out along the lines of gender and sexuality. In the Netherlands, the dominance of secular perspectives is located in a supposed shared national history of the sexual revolution and the (compared to other national contexts) rapid acceptance of homosexuality, leading to the Netherlands becoming the first country to adopt same-sex marriage, in 2001. Here, recent historical transformations are thus viewed as the necessary outcome of unstoppable secularization processes, while religion (in particular Islam and, to a lesser extent, Christianity) is seen as a hinderance to the further development of LGBTIQ+ emancipation.2 In this perspective religion is often portrayed in a one-dimensional way, and differences between religious traditions as well as within religious traditions are discarded. Moreover, the fact that secularism is not necessarily beneficial to the groups whose rights it claims to protect (women, LGTIQ+ people), is neglected.3 While my positionality as a religious person thus includes an investment in women's and LGBTIQ+ emancipation, my positionality as a scholar of religion includes contributing to the knowledge production on secularism and its sometimes negative effects on the public presence of religion. While these mechanisms may be (and probably are) in place in other contexts as well, this paper is limited to a first exploration of how narratives of transformation play out in this specifically "self-appointed front runner" context of the Netherlands. In the research on conversion, this context was extended to the Dutch-speaking countries of western Europe, including also Belgium. In this way, we were able to discuss developments in two countries with different religious landscapes: whereas in the Netherlands Protestantism has been the dominant Christian tradition (symbolically, if not by sheer number of adherents), in Belgium, Roman Catholicism has been most prominent. Scripting Transformation In both projects we used, albeit in slightly different ways, a dramaturgical approach.4 We wondered: Who is this "character" of the convert, of the transgender person, that is invited on the "stage" of the media? How are their stories scripted? Who are the most important flat characters of the story? This approach allowed us to analyze a tension that is necessarily present in the media performances of minorities such as trans people and...