Taking the notion of embodiment as a starting point, this volume maps the interconnecting relationships between religion, gender and sexuality. It highlight how the body its location, the narratives that surround it, its movement and negotiations is central to understanding these multifaceted relationships.
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.
Introduction: Embodying Religion, Gender and Sexuality
Sarah-Jane Page and Katy Pilcher (Aston University, UK)
Part I: Troubling Religious and Secular Dualisms
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)
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 Womens 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
Nigerias 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)
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
