Introduction

The contemporary cross-disciplinary interest in spirituality is a phenomenon of global proportions that belies the process of secularisation so normatively believed and proclaimed in the West. Western women's and gender studies have largely operated within a dominant secular framework whose blindness to religion is now increasingly recognised and critiqued. Not only has religion been a contributing factor in the rise of the women's movement, but also a wide range of religious ideas has impacted on feminism/gender thinking and practice, so that a large body of literature on women's spirituality, feminist spirituality, and spirituality and gender has emerged. While comparatively few secular feminist voices explicitly engage with religion and spirituality, there nonetheless exists a strong implicit spiritual dimension within modern feminism (King, 1993a; King and Beattie, 2005). Moreover, several feminist theorists draw on religious ideas from widely different sources; best known for this are French writers like Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous and Clément (Joy et al, 2002, 2003).

The Pakistani scholar, Durre S. Ahmed (2002), who works in psychology, communications and cultural studies, has created the striking formulation Gendering the Spirit for a collection of essays primarily concerned with women and religion in South and South East Asia, but they also reveal some of the commonalities in the globally emerging narratives of women and spirituality. Ahmed convincingly argues that in a globally postmodern world the subject of women and religion ‘remains postcoloniality's last frontier’ (2002, p 27) which has to be contested and transcended. In the past, women and religion were often colonised through a combination of cultural, religious and sociopolitical forces that used and exploited them for their own particular ends. Differently expressed, one could say that in most previous historical periods women were defined and also largely confined by religious teachings and institutions. Now, by contrast, women are actively redefining religion and spirituality for themselves, in their own voices and categories. Thus with ever greater urgency the challenging question arises as to how women's past situation of unfreedom and dependency, experienced in so many religions, can be replaced by a newly gained autonomy and freedom reached through newly articulated and experienced spiritualities.