1st Edition
Embodying Religion, Gender and Sexuality
Taking the notion of embodiment as a starting point, this volume maps the interconnecting relationships between religion, gender and sexuality.
The chapters highlight how the body – its location, the narratives that surround it, its movement and negotiations – is central to understanding these multifaceted relationships. The contributors recognise the ways in which gender and sexuality are crucial to how we embody religion and encourage a more complex and nuanced understanding of embodied religion. The material is organised according to three central themes: (1) the relationship between the religious and the secular; (2) power, regulation and resistance; and (3) the symbolism of gendered bodies.
Cutting across a range of disciplinary perspectives, Embodying Religion, Gender and Sexuality will be relevant to students of sociology, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, theology and religious studies.
1.Introduction: Embodying Religion, Gender and Sexuality
Sarah-Jane Page and Katy Pilcher (Aston University, UK)
Part I: Troubling Religious and Secular Dualisms
2. Contested Embodiment: The Use of Prayer in Public Displays of Anti-Abortion Activism
Sarah-Jane Page and Pam Lowe (Aston University, UK)
3. Speaking the Body: Examining the Intersections of Sexuality, Secularity and Religion in Dutch Sexuality Education
Brenda Bartelink and Jelle O. Wiering (University of Groningen)
4. Embodied Conversions and Sexual Selves: New Jewish, Christian and Muslim Women in the Netherlands
Lieke L. Schrijvers (Utrecht University, NL and Ghent University, BEL)
5. Embodying Religion, Gender and Citizenship: A Case Study of Muslim Girls Playing Football in a Dutch Urban Neighbourhood
Kathrine van den Bogert (Radboud University Nijmegen, NL)
Part II: Power, Regulation and Resistance
6. Letting the Juices Flow: Reclaiming the Body through Witchcraft
Emma Quilty (University of Newcastle, Australia)
7. Living an "Orgasmic" life: The Spiritual and Religious Journeys of Practitioners of Orgasmic Meditation
Katy Pilcher (Aston University, UK)
8. Reading Biblical Embodiment Cispiciously
Jo Henderson-Merrygold (University of Sheffield, UK)
9. Appropriate, Enigmatic, Aspirational: The Construction of Femininity in Online Videos for Evangelical Women’s Conferences
Emily Winter (Lancaster University, UK)
Part III: The Symbolism of Gendered Bodies
10. The Empty Womb, the Unanswered Prayer: Female Infertility and Involuntary Childlessness in British Mormon Communities
Alison Halford (Coventry University, UK)
11. Premarital Pregnancy and Embodied Femininity: Women Policing Women in Nigeria’s Christian Communities
George O. Amakor (Aston University, UK)
12. Tangled Layers: The Female Body in the Maghreb at the Intersection of Religion, History, and Culture
Rachida Yassine (Ibn Zohr University, Morocco)
13. Tying the Turban: Gendered Religious Fashion among Sikh Diaspora
Sara Bonfanti (University of Trento, IT)
Biography
Sarah-Jane Page is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University, UK
Katy Pilcher is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University, UK
