Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 23 March
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
When we think about religion, what often comes to mind is restricted access to contraception (let alone abortion), proclamations comparing women’s bodies to uncovered meat (and other, less extreme, embraces of female modesty), and debates about veils and burqas. Women’s bodies often serve as battlegrounds for values and ideas.
But that’s not the full story. For centuries, religious women have been involved in challenging the patriarchy by reconsidering practices, scriptures and theologies from the perspective of women’s rights. And religious women around the world have included both feminism and faith in their daily lives.
Celebrating diversity is a cornerstone of modern feminism … how does that extend to religion? In conversation with women of various faiths, we’ll look at how religion and feminism can coexist, and strengthen their lives and identities.
Featuring
Alyena Mohummadally
Alyena Mohummadally is a Pakistani-Australian queer Muslim woman who spent many years as a community legal centre lawyer before recently retraining as a primary school teacher.
She is currently writing a cookbook on modern Australian cuisine with a Pakistani twist, and her two young sons are her favourite people to cook for.
She founded the Queer Muslims in Australia Yahoo Group in 2005 and has been published in journals, books, articles, spoken at conferences, workshops and has had documentaries made on her queer Muslim advocacy. Alyena had a long tenure on the Australian GLBTIQ Multicultural Council Inc.
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Maxine Beneba Clarke is the author of the acclaimed memoir The Hate Race, the award-winning short fiction collection Foreign Soil, the poetry collections Carrying The World and How Decent Folk Behave, and many other books for adults and children. Her forthcoming poetry collection is It's The Sound of the Thing: 100 new poems for young people. She is currently Poet in Residence at Melbourne University.
View Profile
Bernadette Tobin
Bernadette Tobin is one of the most original and respected voices in Catholic Health Care Ethics. She is Director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics, a joint centre of Australian Catholic University and St Vincents & Mater Health Sydney, and Reader in Philosophy at Australian Catholic University.
Tobin is honorary ethicist at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead in Sydney, conjoint associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of New South Wales and conjoint associate professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Sydney.
Her areas of research include ethical issues in health care, philosophical issues in moral development and philosophical issues in religious belief. Her interests include the philosophy of religion, bioethics and the philosophy of education.
Jordy Silverstein
Jordy is a historian and writer. She is the author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn Books, 2015), co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016), and has been published in New Matilda, Overland and the Conversation.
She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in History at the University of Melbourne, researching a history of Australian government policy towards child refugees as part of the ARC Laureate Research Fellowship 'Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism from 1920 to the present'. Her other research projects have examined histories of modern Jewish identity, sexuality and collective memory.