In Canada, women’s bodies are often at the centre of debates about religious pluralism, multiculturalism, and secularism. Women have long played a critical role in building and maintaining diasporic religious communities and networks, and they have also been catalysts for change and transformation within religious groups and the wider community.

Relation and Resistance explores the stories and lives of racialized women connected with religious diaspora communities in Canada. Contributors from across disciplines show how women are conceptualizing traditions in transformative ways, challenging prevailing assumptions about diasporic religion as nostalgically entrenched in the past. The collected essays include chapters on feminist and queer women thinking critically about Hindu and Muslim identities and beliefs and challenging anti-Black racism and settler colonialism; Afro-Caribbean and Métis writers using literature to explore religion and belonging; the impact of women’s participation in Japanese, Chinese, and Pakistani transnational religious organizations; and marriage, migration, and gender equality in the Punjabi Sikh and Malayali Christian communities. The volume closes with a chapter exploring Métis diasporic experience and inviting readers to think critically about diasporic religion on Indigenous land.

An innovative and timely volume, Relation and Resistance reveals that a deeper understanding of women’s experiences of displacement, migration, race, and gender is critical to the study of religion in Canada.

Sailaja Krishnamurti is associate professor of religious studies and women and gender studies at Saint Mary's University.

Sailaja Krishnamurti's profile page

Becky R. Lee is an associate professor in Humanities at York University. Her research and teaching are concerned with the intersection of religion and gender. A historian of religion, Lee’s research has focused primarily on birthing rites in the middle ages. Her teaching centres on more contemporary issues including the relationship between religion and marginalization.

Becky R. Lee's profile page

"Relation and Resistance is a compelling addition to the fields of gender, religious, and diaspora studies, with an impressive range of scholars featured, and each chapter making a collaborative and sustained contribution to the topic under discussion." Ayesha Chaudhry, University of British Columbia and author of The Colour of God

“Krishnamurti and Lee’s timely contribution to the fields of diaspora studies, religious studies, and transnational Canadian studies opens up conversations about the intersections of race, religion, and diaspora. The work allows for a new framing of diaspora as a shifting and expansive category to open up new possibilities of understanding racialized communities across Canada.” University of Toronto Quarterly