Afterword
Why think about religion and the body together? In one way, the
connection between religion and the body is so naturalized that it is
odd to even ask this question. Political life in the United States,
for example, is saturated with discussion of the body, particularly of
gender and sexuality, in terms of religion. Marriage, (whether gay and
to be regulated or heterosexual and to be promoted) is the object of
much policy-making and much religious invocation on the floor of both
state and federal legislative bodies—as is abortion, gender identity,
and sexually transmitted disease (whether with regard to HPV or HIV).
Yet, the oddness of the political pairing between religion and the
body in a country that is supposed to separate church and state is
rarely remarked upon. High level cases over the display of religious
symbols on public property may make it to the Supreme Court, as may
conflict over discrimination in hiring within religious institutions,
but the Court has never heard a suit claiming that the regulation of
gender and sexuality should not be a matter of state concern because it
imbricates the state in religion.
Nor is the oddness of presuming a link between religion and the body
necessarily commented upon in academic circles in the U.S. In fact,
presuming a link between conservative religion and issues of gender and
sexuality has often passed for scholarship—and this is true in both
religious studies and queer studies. If some religious people (and
sometimes religious studies) have been willing to see gender and
sexuality as the appropriate purview of religious regulation, queers and
queer studies have also been willing to attribute to this relation the
status of common sense. At its most direct, the idea that religious
people should promote the regulation of sexuality or intolerance on the
basis of gender and sexuality comes down to the common sense formula,
"of course they hate us (women, queers, whoever else); they're
religious." This formulation not only ignores the diversity of
religious understandings of gender and sexuality, but also reinforces
the idea that the appeal to religion provides an explanation in and of
itself. Henry Abelove, one of the founders of queer studies, who wrote
an early book on religion and sexuality, The Evangelist of
Desire, debunked this presumption long ago. Through a study of the
development of a religious movement around John Wesley, Abelove shows
how commonsensical presumptions about religion come to be treated as
historical fact. When asking the central question of his book, "Why did
Wesley's religious movement develop a following?" he provides a
particularly devastating opening, which shows that the basic
historiography of his question depended on the presumption, "Of course
Wesley had followers, he was religious." Abelove shows that not only is
there no such, "of course" about it (plenty of religious innovators did
not have followers), but he makes a strong case that the power of desire
had something to do with it. If you read those opening paragraphs of
The Evangelist of Desire, it's clear that the "of course: they're
religious," analysis is not particularly illuminating.
But if not commonsense, then what does bring the body into such close
proximity to religion? After all, the United States is not the only
country where the pairing of embodiment and religiosity is central to
culture and society, including the workings of the state.
This pairing is one of the central concerns of transnational politics.
A strong strain of thinking about global politics after the end of the
Cold War in 1989 has focused on religious conflict as a driving force in
politics (this theory is most often associated with Samuel Huntington's
1996 book, Clash of Civilizations). Major religious traditions
do not necessarily provide simple sites for civilizational conflict,
however. Those traditions called "world religions" cover large
geographic areas, have long histories, and are internally diverse with
many different denominations, sects or strands of thought and practice.
Given this diversity and complexity, one of the ways that both scholars
and pundits have marked religious difference is through an emphasis on
differences with regard to gender and sexuality. Commentators often
read a range of qualities off of gender relations or sexual practices:
binaries like that between freedom and oppression; modernity and the
archaic; reasonableness and fanaticism are interpreted based on
interpretations of social norms about gender identity, the treatment of
women or sexual freedom and conservatism. Differences in gender and
sexual relations become the cultural sign of supposed civilizational
fault lines as we are supposed to be able to read a whole range of
political positions and commitments from marriage practices or norms
about women's clothing.
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