How do religion, gender and sexuality interact? How have they impacted, and continue to impact, human culture? The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion, Sexuality and Gender brings together, for the first time, the key texts in the field. Designed as a textbook for use in a classroom setting, it offers thought-provoking selections of some of the most compelling and timely readings available today.
The Reader is divided into three parts (bodies; desires; performances). Each considers, from a thematic perspective, the ways in which people have made sense of their religious and sexual experiences, the ways they imagine and talk about gender, sex and the sacred, and the multiple meanings they ascribe to them. Traditions represented include indigenous spiritualities, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Asian traditions and new religious movements. Some readings are more theoretical or historical in nature, thereby providing wide-ranging contexts for reflection and discussion.
The reader includes extensive introductions to the book as a whole and to each of the three parts, as well as short paragraphs contextualizing each of the readings. Each section includes discussion questions for classroom use; additional readings and resources, as well as a glossary of key terms, are also provided. The Bloomsbury Reader in Religion, Sexuality and Gender is an ideal resource for courses on religion and sexuality, religion and gender, or religion and contemporary culture more generally.
Author(s): Donald L. Boisvert (editor), Carly Daniel-Hughes (editor)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 288
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Permissions
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the Volume
The study of sexuality and religion
Part One Bodies
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Stereotypes, False Images, Terrorism
The Jezebel
Mammy
Violent bucks
Mammy to matriarch: The Moynihan Report
Jezebel to welfare queen
Chapter 3 Sin
Disordered desires
Is it a sin?
What does sin mean?
Chapter 4 Blood, Sweat, and Urine
Chapter 5 Sex
Action, body, and physical reality
Chapter 6 The Ultimate Man
Chapter 7 Miẓvot Built into the Body
Introduction
Women’s bodies and the women’s miz.vot
The significance of the women’s miz.vot
The view of the tkhines
Tkhines, musar, and women’s alterity
Chapter 8 Gendering the Ungendered Body
Chapter 9 “Mildred, Is It Fun to Be a Cripple?” The Culture of Suffering in Mid-Twentieth Century American Catholicism
Chapter 10 Discussion Questions
Part Two Desires
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Introduction: Axiomatic
Axiom 1: People are different from each other
Chapter 3 Scientia Sexualis
Chapter 4 Law and Desire in the Talmud
Chapter 5 Tongues Untied
Chapter 6 Sexual Desire, Divine Desire; or, Queering the Beguines
Chapter 7 Kūkai and the Tradition of Male Love in Japanese Buddhism
The Kūkai Legend
Kōbō Daishi’s Book
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Conclusion
Rock Azaleas
Preface
The Great Mirror of Male Love
Chapter 8 The Passions of St. Pelagius
Chapter 9 Masturbation, Salvation, and Desire
Chapter 10 Discussion Questions
Part Three Performances
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Gender Trouble
Chapter 3 Witches, Female Priests and Sacred Manoeuvres
Chapter 4 Mama Lola and the Ezilis
Chapter 5 (Per)formative Selves
Practice makes the perfect woman: Markers and methods of gender enactment
Tailored identities: Sartorial markers and gender hierarchies
Hormone use and the sculpting of “female” bodies
The mimesis of femininity and parodic gender subversion
“Troubling” performances: Hijra hand-clapping
(Dis)embodied exposures, revealing practices
Chapter 6 Toward a Queer Theology of Flourishing
Chapter 7 Intimacy Surveilled
Religion in the halls of government
Neither whore nor doormat
Let’s talk about sex
Chapter 8 Release from Bondage
Chapter 9 Nakedness, Nonviolence, and Brahmacharya
I Continence and the blot of lust
II Gandhi’s vagina: A political account of semen
III Naked before God: The infinite play of sexuality
Chapter 10 Discussion Questions
Glossary
Index
