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 Islamism² 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 progressive⁴ 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-constitution⁶, inter-dependencies and inter-imbrications, in what Jakobsen and Pellegrini have come to call Protestant or Christian Secularism⁷. 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 religion⁹; the role of the media and the political forms of religion¹⁰; or the specific resonances of the Christian-Capitalist assemblage¹¹; we decided, taking insight from Saba Mahmood’s critique of Western feminist notions of agency in Islamist movements and other works¹², 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.

1. See The Politics of Religion and Sexuality conference program. I would like to thank Janet Jakobsen, Patricia Clough, Stanley Aronowitz, Joe Rollins and Rupal Oza for their aid in planning the conference, and helping to plant the seeds for this special issue. [↩]
2. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, Duke University Press, 2007). [↩]
3. See: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Mariner Books, 2006); David Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2007); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve Press, 2007). [↩]
4. Sam Harris being the exception here. His rabidly Islamophobic The End of Faith, started the “day after 9/11” could be confused with a State Dept. propaganda subcontractor as he beats the drums of war, attacking Arundati Roy and Noah Chomsky for their criticism, while proclaiming the “moral” superiority of Bush and Blair in their war aims compared with Saddam and Bin Laden. [↩]
5. As Janet K. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (eds.) complexify though their work Secularisms (Durham: Duke University, 2008). [↩]
6. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). [↩]
7. Jakobsen and Pellegrini, “Introduction: Times Like These,” Secularisms. [↩]
8. Hent De Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). [↩]
9. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). [↩]
10. Charles Hirschkind and Brain Larkin, “Introduction: Media and the Political Forms of Religion,” Social Text 96 26:3 (2008). [↩]
11. William Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). [↩]
12. Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. [↩]