Uskonnollisten identifikaatioiden mikropolitiikkaa Iholla-todellisuustelevisiossa

Kirjoittajat

• Sandra Wallenius-Korkalo

Abstrakti

This article examines micro-politics of religious identification and its representations in the Finnish reality-television series Iholla. The article situates politics as an integral part of everyday life and approaches reality-television as a site where political identities, subjectivities and (imaged) communities are produced. Through an empirical case study of an ex-member of the revivalist movement Conservative Laestadianism, Sanni, in the TV series Iholla, the article traces the ways in which an individual discursively and materially negotiates, and struggles with, the transformation of identity, following religious exit. The article applies Rogers Brubaker’s (2016) formulation of ‘trans’ to think about changing conceptions of religious identity. Sanni’s identity transformation is approached in threefold inquiry: First, as a unidirectional movement, emphasizing breaking away from the perceived constraints of Laestadianism; secondly, in continuous gradation and negotiation, rather than categorical difference between religious and secular identity enactment; and finally, as an active and self-conscious stance that challenges the idea of one-dimensional continuum between one category and the other. The position of betweenness that characterizes ‘trans’ identity is not defined in temporal terms, as phase that will pass, but as a position of political potentiality.