Yet, as Sadia Toor shows in detailing just two cases of legal conflict over gender and sexuality in Pakistan, we cannot very easily predict the contours or the outcome of such conflicts simply by knowing that Pakistan is officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Through a reading of a case where a legal and religiously acceptable marriage becomes the subject of state intervention on behalf of disapproving parents in relation to a case where the state steps in to protect the marriage of a female-to-male transsexual, Toor details some of the inter-related factors that come into play when conflicts break out over how individuals enact and embody their lives. These multiple factors include the desire among the parents of marriageable children for class status and mobility, the effects of World Bank structural adjustment policies, the lingering effects of policy choices made during the Cold War, and a surprising openness to transgender lives, showing that religion may be just one textural element in the social fabric that makes some marriages subject to legal intervention and others to legal protection—regardless of the predominant religion in the country. Instead of focusing on religion, Toor suggests that we look to competing patriarchies as a possible point of explanation for how and why marriages that push the boundaries of acceptance are regulated in contemporary Pakistan. Competition among the forms of patriarchal regulation associated with different classes within Pakistan or between the forms of patriarchy in Pakistan and the forms associated with the United States and European countries may be as likely to be the driving force of these conflicts as is the religious identification of different classes or nations. When enquiring into why some person, group or nation-state is conservative about gender and sexuality, the answer, “because they are religious,” tells us next to nothing. We may want to consider the role of religion, but we should be leery of seeing religion as determinative of what happens to either the individual or the social body. In other words, the association of religion and the body is a question, rather than an answer. In asking questions about why so many scholars, politicians and individuals are willing to attribute embodied regulation to religious causes, we might learn something about how our world is constructed as well as about possible alternatives.
Theories of religious difference grounded in embodiment also shade over into theories of difference between the religious and the secular. Unlike religious codes and strictures, secular approaches to embodiment are presumed to be based in science. Yet, as Ann Burlein details in her essay, even the most advanced science can depend on religious ideas. Burlein explores the language and metaphors of the human genome project in order to show how religious and secular understandings of embodiment remain intertwined. In contrast to Biblical religion, genetics promises to provide a completely scientific “book of life,” but the sermons of embodiment produced by this science amazingly remain focused on gender, sexuality and normative ideas of the family. It is not surprising that the science of genetics is focused on heredity, but, as Burlein points out, this focus is maintained even though social inequalities can “exert greater impact on biological processes” than does genetics. Within genetic science the family is seen as determinative of one’s prospects for health and happiness, and so the “family romance”—and its religious overtones—returns to provide the structure for a highly scientific, highly secular discourse. Sexual identity may become less important, even as family-formation becomes more so. The willingness to organize one’s life into families with clearly delineated biological heritage—whether gained from a sperm bank or the old fashioned way—remains crucial to social organization. As Burlein says, “One can see … a shift that backgrounds both reproduction and identity in favor of foregrounding the domestic romance in the changing status of homosexuality. In its recent Lawrence decision, the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly argued against identifying non-procreative sexuality with death (the argument of Bowers v. Hardwick). But, Lawrence is far from protecting sexual relations as sites of dissent for the invention of unforeseen models of life …. Lawrence decriminalized sodomy only in the private space of a domestic couple.” In other words, the division between religion and the secular is not the end of the story any more than religion is a fully explanatory variable in social life. It is no more an explanation to say, “Because they’re secular” than it is to say, “Because they’re religious.”
The real breakthrough of the essays in “Religion and the Body” is that they push beyond the boundaries created by the need for simple divisions and singular explanations. Take, for example, Melissa Wilcox’s essay on the contemporary practice of self-injury. Wilcox explores the various meanings that may be operative when individuals cut or otherwise injure themselves. She looks at expressive and functional understandings, while also placing these practices in the context of religious ritual. She points out that ascetic practices that can damage the body, like fasting for one’s beliefs, can be highly validated in the context of religious practice. Wilcox suggests that the lens of religious meaning offers leverage for understanding a form of action that is considered pathological within a solely psychological framework. In this case, instead of narrowing possibilities for understanding, a framework provided by an understanding of the body in relation to religious practice might provide an insightful means of approaching and responding to a complex bodily practice.
Rather than providing a new frame for understanding an embodied practice, Minoo Moallem looks at how bodily practice can displace frames of reference. Moallem considers Iranian films that use motifs of passing, whether cross-gendered passing, a pop singer passing for a classical musician or a criminal passing for a clergyman. In these films, passing dislocates embodiment. Visibility and corporeality are often used to provide anchors for identity. One may display one’s relation to others, to a political position or even to one’s nation in the way one comports one’s body—such that we know a criminal or a clergyman by how he carries his body, how he dresses, whom he stands close to, and his bodily capabilities (for either prayer or prison-breaks). Films about passing, however, show that embodiment is as unstable a ground for identity as aspects of human life that are considered more internal and ephemeral. By refusing the “straight” reading of the body (in which one can move interpretively from bodily comportment to respectable dress to religious conservatism to support for the nation), Moallem hopes to open the door to the idea that the connections among politics, religion and embodiment might not be so straightforward. One might even find allies for secular political reform amongst those who are religious. And, importantly, enmity between religion and secularism not only makes it difficult to find such allies, but can cut back on the social space in Iran for a wide range of secular practices. If all that is secular is the enemy of the religious, any secular act can be configured as a social problem. Films of passing cannot fundamentally subvert these relations. Such films may simply be a lighthearted means of showing up some of our daily presumptions; in the end they may even come around to reinforcing the presumptions that make for their humor. But, on Moallem’s reading they may also provide a parable for how to live in a world that is open to all kinds of possibilities, embodiments, and alliances.
