About this Issue
Religion, secularism, the body, and sexuality are often bound
together in our national imagination, and indeed, our national
conversations. As this issue vividly exposes, common assumptions of
religion as the site of corporeal negation or punishment and secularism
as ever-stalwart friend to the body and sexuality permeate political and
cultural discourses. Ideas about morality, relationships, intimacy,
health, medicine, the family, war, justice, love and the good life
repeatedly hinge on these counterposed amalgamations, as if
distinguishing between the religious and the secular (ideas, people,
spaces, communities) will reveal the putative truth of our bodies and
bodily practices, which will, in turn, reveal the putative truth of our
lives.
This journal issue, as timely as ever, ruptures these assumptions,
showing both the deep inextricability of religious and secular
discourses in constructing the body, as well as the ways in which such
discourses alone can never tell the complete story of gendered and
sexual bodies and practices. Religion and secularism are always caught
up in history, geography and politics, as each author shows, and their
relationships to gender, sexuality and the body shift according to
additional social forces at play. The visual contributions to Religion
and the Body add an irreverent, but no less thoughtful examination of
such relations, tackling deeply held suppositions, and queering the
troubling oppositional discourses about religion and secularism. Recent
movements, from Cairo to Wall Street, have exposed this false binary and
deepened our understanding of the ways in which religion and secularism
come together—in ideas, practices and bodies—in complex and stunning
forms.
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