In this article, I engage with feminist discussions about secularity, gender, and emancipation. The feminist study of the secular was spurred by interventions of Saba Mahmood [2005. The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press], and can be seen as a critical engagement with at least one basic assumption that underlies much of progressive thinkingthat secularism is beneficial for women and LGBTQ subjects. I begin by exploring how the Belgian feminist activist platform Baas Over Eigen Hoofd! (Boss Over One's Own Head!) builds a locally suited theory and practice of emancipation. I analyse how BOEH! raises questions about gender and secularity. Second, I zoom-out by mapping feminist studies of the secular in Western European contexts, distinguishing various analytical approaches and visions on social-political secular emancipatory alternatives. To conclude, I relate local feminist activism to feminist academic discussions, and argue that there is a continued need for thinking about shared emancipatory futures.Emancipation is not an 'all or nothing' affair. (Nancy Fraser in: Fraser and Liakova 2008, 4) The story [of secularism] has had enormous staying power. Our view of history is shaped by that story. (Scott 2018, 14) Posing questions about emancipation often means criticising political, social, cultural, and religious structures of dominance and revealing the relationships between freedom and its restrictions. Critical theories, such as feminist, postcolonial, and queer theories, and social movements, such as women's, antiracist, and LGBTQ movements, analyse the restriction of freedom in various ways and as such propose differing ideas about progressive change. In Western contexts influenced by a European Enlightenment tradition, 'emancipation' is a layered and emphatic concept, referring to equality, self-determination, liberation, and individual responsibility (Birkle et al. 2012). Posing questions about emancipation within this political-cultural framework leads to asking about the obstacles to equality and self-determination: Liberation from what? Self-determination regarding what? What does it mean to be responsible for building one's 'own life'? (Bauhardt 2004).