Abstract
This chapter looks at both what New Atheism has to say about gender and how it is itself performing gender. In order to explore these questions, we will first examine what New Atheism has had to say on gender by scrutinising each of the ‘four horsemen’s’ main publications on religion. This is followed by a discussion of Ayyan Hirsi Ali’s public introduction to the circle of four at the 2012 Melbourne Global Atheist Convention and the contribution made by this female face of New Atheism. We then go on to contextualise this by pondering the relationship between gender and atheism in general as well as New Atheism in particular. The ways in which the New Atheist protagonists perform masculinities invite us to reflect on the fact that these are specifically intellectual masculinities. Finally, some elements for an answer to the question of New Atheism’s gender are assembled—along with more questions for future research.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Non-apocalypse’ can be found on a range of websites referring to the Washington conversation; ‘anti-apocalypse’ was used for instance in 2011 (when Hitchens was still alive) by the Atheist Foundation of Australia announcing the horsemen’s appearance at the Melbourne Global Atheist Convention the following year.
- 2.
This edition has a foreword by Christopher Hitchens , who writes about his friendship with Hirsi Ali.
- 3.
Another Dutch critic of religion who has played a role in Hirsi Ali’s biography is Paul Cliteur , whom she remembers in Infidel as one of her professors at Leiden, as someone who believes in and defends reason. Hirsi Ali rejects the idea that his critiques of multiculturalism and Islam made him a right-wing conservative. Cliteur (2010) includes a discussion of Hirsi Ali’s debate with Tariq Ramadan.
- 4.
The metaphor of the cage has also made it into one of her book titles as The Caged Virgin (Hirsi Ali 2008b).
- 5.
On her contribution to the controversial short film Submission, see Jusová (2008).
- 6.
Snel and Stock (2008, 131 fn. 1) do, however, concede that Infidel is less strident in these respects and not quite as generalising about Islam as some of Hirsi Ali’s political statements.
- 7.
Such evidence is used to support ‘a version of the argument from evil’ (Overall 2007, 235). Overall herself is not convinced by feminist theologians’ attempts at redefining the divine, for ‘the attempts by some feminists to reconstruct God as feminine, as androgynous, as genderless, or as a Goddess are inadequate because they raise unanswered questions about the justification of belief in such a being’ (2007, 246).
- 8.
Masculinity and maleness are, of course, often constructed as identical from an emic point of view. An example for this can be found in Furseth (2010, 226) with its male interviewee, Jan, for whom ‘a male identity excludes a religious identity.’
- 9.
From the perspective of ideology critique, it seems that—through its protagonists—the New Atheist community, especially insofar as it identifies itself as ideal expression of the spirit of Western democracy, cannot but negate other communities. Proclamations on their lack of reason serve the functions of justificatory ideology (to outsiders and fence-sitters) and motivational reinforcement (to insiders).
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Finger, A. (2017). Four Horsemen (and a Horsewoman): What Gender Is New Atheism?. In: Cotter, C., Quadrio, P., Tuckett, J. (eds) New Atheism: Critical Perspectives and Contemporary Debates. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 21. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54964-4_9
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