‘The Church is against us!’ Feminist collective apostasies and the struggle for gender equality in Argentina and Spain

Feminist mobilisations risen across the globe in the last few years. This is especially the case in Latin America and Spain, where social movements to claim the legalisation of abortion and to end violence against women have become key political actors. Some of these movements have adopted collective apostasies as a tool within their mobilisation repertoires to denounce the role of the Catholic Church in maintaining the patriarchal system and interfering in the state and politics. By collectively and formally leaving the Church, members of these groups bring together the fights for gender equality and for the separation of church and state. In so doing, they make apostasy a highly politicised action, far from how previous scholarly conceptualisations of institutional disaffiliation considered it an individual process of religious disengagement. Feminist groups identify the Church as an enemy of women’s rights and while they acknowledge the restricted impact apostasies may have, they perceive them as useful tools to open up public debates around the contentious intersection of institutional religion and gender. This contribution draws on interviews, ethnographic observations, and document and visual analysis of feminist collective apostasies in Argentina and Spain to unpack the discourses generated in and around them.