GENDERED DYNAMICS IN THE FORMATION OF MULTIPLE RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES IN DIGITAL SPACE

Abstract

This article examines how gender shapes the formation, transformation, and representation of multiple religious identities in digital environments. It responds to the growing significance of social media, online communities, and blogging platforms as spaces in which religious subjectivity is constructed, negotiated, and publicly recognized. Digital media environments reshape modes of religious expression, forms of authority, visual practices of piety, and the boundary between private and public religiosity. The article aims to clarify how gender structures the representation of religious identity online and what forms of multiple religious identities emerge on social media. The study is conceptual-theoretical in nature and draws on an interdisciplinary synthesis of religious studies, the sociology of religion, digital culture studies, gender studies, and Islamic feminist thought. It analyzes digital religion, lived religion, multiple religious identities, visual religiosity, women’s religious agency, and platformed self-presentation as interrelated analytical categories. The article develops the argument that gender should be understood not as an external variable of religious identity, but as a constitutive mechanism shaping regimes of visibility, embodiment, authority, normativity, and public recognition. Particular attention is paid to digital Islam, women’s religious self-presentation, the hijab, modest fashion, blogging culture, and emerging forms of religious agency in platformed environments.