Feminist Complaint Collectives and Doorway Disruptions in Australian Christian Traditions

Christian traditions maintain patriarchal cultures by upholding gendered norms that can shape ministry opportunities and sanction gender inequality and sexism, while also scaffolding gendered violence. Feminist Christian women who name this inequality, or who ‘protest’ and ‘complain’ can therefore be subject to a range of adverse consequences, from subtle social disapproval to malicious abuse and exclusion. Simultaneously, although Christian women led in 19th century feminist movements, contemporary religious and secular feminists can be mutually sceptical. As a result, Christian feminist women often occupy a marginal space. Sara Ahmed has consistently argued that when feminists speak of sexism within institutional settings, the response is often to problematise the complainer. Ahmed (2021) introduces the idea of forming complaint collectives to enable feminists to do counter-institutional work. In this paper we use Ahmed’s scholarship to locate Christian feminists as ‘complainants’ and assemble ourselves to create a Christian feminist complaint collective. We present case studies of complaints and doorway disruptions in Catholic, Anglican, and pentecostal settings to challenge gender inequality and marginalisation and reconceptualise how feminist theory can be (re)applied to feminist activism within Christian religious traditions and communities.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.