Introduction
What role does gender, sexuality and the body play in producing the
idea that religion, and particularly politicized religion, is equal to
conservatism, while secularism is progressive?
This was the central question posed to participants at the 2007
conference from which this special issue arises, "The Politics of
Religion and Sexuality," sponsored by the CUNY Grad Center's Center for
Culture, Technology and Work, the Center for the Study of Women and
Society, and Barnard's Center for Research on
Women.[1] The conference
meant to address the multitude of recent, highly politicized
issues at the nexus of religion, secularism, sexuality, gender,
politics, and bodies: the ongoing "civilizational" debate in the U.S. over the threat
of Islamism[2]
and the status of women and queers in "Islamic"
societies; controversies over the banning of veils in France; gay
marriage and its influence on U.S. electoral politics; the global schism
in the Anglican Church (and potentially others) over homosexuality; the
rise of deeply conservative Catholic and evangelical churches in Africa
and other parts of the developing world; the stymying of AIDS prevention
efforts; the Dutch cartoons of Muhammad; Catholic sex abuse cases;
evangelical preacher sex scandals; and the ideologically-driven crusade
to "save Muslim queers and women," to name just a few.
These conflicts, particularly over the role of Islamist movements,
but also the Christian Right, have often led to an alarmed, if not
alarmist, narrative about the rise of conservative, politicized
religious movements around the world in almost every religion, seeking
to resist secular establishments and "liberal" culture, while mobilizing
to re-impose various forms of patriarchal culture. While such
developments certainly challenge the secularization thesis, which
predicted the decline of religion with modernity, the conference wished
to engage the subsequent development, if not standoff, that serves to
uncritically equate religion with the conservative and the secular with
the progressive.
Interestingly, the conference coincided as well with the emergence of
a significant backlash against religion by the science-defending "new
atheists."[3]
While mildly more progressive[4] than the
"civilizational" narrative in its willingness to criticize the
theocratic tendencies of the U.S. government, rather than simply
focusing on the threat of Islamic radicalism (and helping give a voice
to the growing group of "unbelievers" often left out of national
politics in the U.S.), this backlash follows this popular and troubling
tendency to overstate the distinction between science/secularism and
religion, re-inscribing the uncritical configuration of religion with
conservatism and secularism with a progressive liberalism. Such popular
and dominant perspectives reveal a relatively uncritical faith in the
progress narrative of science, Enlightenment, and modernity, in stark
contrast to the emerging scholarly consensus that
the assumptions of the secularization thesis need to be rethought.
Further, it does this in a way that tends to leave the crucial work of
cultural analysis behind, particularly any more complex analysis
regarding conflicts over gender, sexuality, and bodies, even while
invoking these conflicts to justify its claims. If the march of
Enlightenment, progress, science and modernity is so unstoppable, as
they argue, how to explain the profusion of conservative, politicized,
neo-patriarchal religious movements they are so alarmed about? Needless
to say, this paradox is left remarkably unexamined in their
writings.
The solution typically offered by these narratives is more
secularism. Yet, why is secularism always assumed to be the solution,
rather than part of the problem? What role does secularism,
particularly in its dominant, neoliberal forms, so influential around
the globe, have in producing these conflicts? Conference organizers saw
many problems with this narrative, not least of which was the unhelpful
marginalization of more progressive religious movements and alternate
secular perspectives; the assumption that secularism or liberalism is
necessarily progressive or even one "thing"[5]; as well as the assumption that "really
existing" secularism(s) were necessarily "secular" rather than the
expression of a particular society's cultural and religious values. One
would think a little reflection on the role of the "West" and its
Christian rhetoric of a "crusade" against terrorism during the run-up to
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would disturb this narrative. The aim
then of the conference was to trouble this configuration, by focusing on
the role issues of sexuality, gender, and bodily regulation—so often
referred to in justifying the association of religion with conservatism
and secularism with an enlightened liberalism—play in helping to
produce this configuration.
Along these lines, various thinkers, such as Talal Asad, have sought
to critically reexamine the shortcomings and paradoxes of the
secularization narrative by rethinking the relationship between the
religious and the secular, highlighting their historical
co-constitution[6],
inter-dependencies and inter-imbrications, in what
Jakobsen and Pellegrini have come to call Protestant or Christian
Secularism[7].
For instance, Jakobsen and Pellegrini point out the influence and role
of the Protestant work ethic in creating the practices that have given rise
to global, free market capitalism, generally understood as the "universal"
underpinning of today's secularism. Others, provocatively reversing the
"post-Christian" terminology of the "God is Dead" era of theology,
propose the somewhat ambiguous term "postsecular" in describing the
current era.[8]
While various recent works explore secularism's debt to religion[9];
the role of the media and the
political forms of religion[10];
or the specific resonances of the
Christian-Capitalist assemblage[11];
we decided,
taking insight from Saba Mahmood's critique of Western feminist notions
of agency in Islamist movements and other works[12],
to focus on the
relatively neglected interplay between religion/secularisms, politics
and sexuality/gender/body across the "civilizational" divide. Given
how gendered, queer and racialized bodies often mediate conflicts in
times of global anxiety, and the multiple crises around the
globe—economic, cultural, political, and ecological—examining how these
crises permeate these intersections seems particularly apropos.
The central questions the conference invited different thinkers,
scholars, and activists to examine then were the following: given the
associations typically made in dominant political and scientific
discourse between secularism and liberalism on the one hand, and
religion and conservatism on the other, what role does gender and
sexuality play in producing this configuration? Secondly, how and why
have cultural issues of sexual freedom championed by liberal groups been
so effectively used by the Right to pit popular sentiment against them?
Finally, how is the emergence of conservative, politicized religious
movements indicative of problems stemming from modernity itself and its
dominant narrative, science?
In grappling with these questions across a range of specific
contexts, a consensus emerged among participants at the conference, and
particularly the contributors for this special issue, that sexuality,
gender, and the body play a central role in producing the
conservative/religion and liberalism/secularism configuration; though in
often detrimental ways, as the associations in this configuration tend
to be facile and obscure underlying complexities. Examining specific
intersections of religions, bodies, gender, sexuality, politics, and secularisms in
different national and cultural contexts highlights the extent to which
these associations do not do justice to the complexity embedded within
some of the most controversial and poignant conflicts of today, even
while, paradoxically, issues of sexuality, gender, and bodies often help
produce this very configuration. Lastly, science and the Enlightenment
progress narrative are far from being the liberating force they often
present themselves as vis-à-vis women's rights, sexuality, gender, and bodies.
In fact, they are often implicated in helping to produce conservative, politicized
religious movements via their complicity with neocolonialism,
neoliberalism, globalization, and the Protestant/Christian Secular.
The special issue itself ultimately morphed into a focus on the role
conflicts around bodies, sexuality, and gender have in producing and
being produced by the configuration religion/conservatism and
liberalism/secularism in three different contexts. The first section
examines their intersections, ambiguities, and co-dependencies within
the context of the Christian Secular, science, and liberalism. The
second examines their complexities as displayed within different Islamic
social and national contexts in opposition to the orientalist,
monolithic "Islam" represented in the West. The third section engages in a
more playful analysis of various queer visual art and video, examining
efforts at re-appropriating and re-configuring religion and religious
imagery and the skewing of these dominant associations in and for queer
culture.
The tentative conclusion this special issue ultimately reaches is a
paradoxical one: that conflicts around bodies, gender and sexuality have
both a major role in producing the dominant associations of
religion/conservatism and liberalism/secularism while at the same time
being produced by them. Further, the dominant forms of secularism,
particularly of the Protestant or neoliberal secular forms of
modernization so influential around the globe, help produce—and
indeed are often entwined with—the very conservative, politicized
religious movements that ostensibly oppose them, fueling the
intensifying conflicts around sexuality, gender, and bodily regulation
this issue examines. While conflicts around sexuality, gender and
bodies are nothing new, one wonders to what extent their rising
barometer is indexed to the proliferation of stale, stagnant, if not
corrupt forms of secularism around the globe, implicated in the revolts
of the Arab Spring, the London riots, and contemporary United States
politics. The hope of this special issue is that in looking at these
conflicts across a wide range of contexts, more insight can be reached
about this paradoxical relationship; opening up and distressing this
often trite, stalemated, yet dominant configuration in ways that might
allow for more interesting, liberating and radical alternatives,
beckoning towards a more playful, open-ended, inclusive future for
queers, feminists, religionists, and secularists of all stripes.
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