16 - Sexing religion

Summary

Sex has been a fundamental descriptive category in religious studies for centuries. It is difficult, in fact, to imagine a subject that has played a greater role in shaping the conceptual frameworks that have dominated this field. The subject of sexual relations has been pivotal in accounting for something called “religion” in human experience, in generating curiosity and producing analyses about religious others, and in establishing boundaries between Christianity and other religions. The history of academic religious fascination with sex is a shifting and complex one, to be sure, and it has perennially had to contend with suspicions that its purveyors might turn out to be furtive libertines or voyeurs. But there is no missing the centrality of this subject in the genealogy of theories that have dominated the modern study of religion.

Recent decades have, nonetheless, witnessed a steep rise in the number of works devoted to sexuality in religious studies, generated by considerably different concerns and questions than their predecessors. This upsurge has been part of a larger trend throughout the humanities and social sciences, where, for nearly a quarter-century, questions about sexual identity, orientation, desire, and embodied practice, along with inquiries into legal proscriptions and protections, have proliferated. Scholarly publishing in the study of religion, as well as the conference programs of learned societies such as the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature, illustrate the prominence of such research in the discipline.