Religion and Sexuality

"“We’ve seen a systematic rape of our youth by Muslim gangs and the police knew it was going on for 20 years and they didn’t do anything….They allowed rape through fear of being called a racist…. We’ve broke[n] that taboo.”  (Former EDL leader Robinson on Crosstalk)

Public space contestations between members of the British Muslim community and the wider native population have produced some interesting reconstructions and negotiations of identity. Whilst previous studies focused on sensational events such as the Rushdie affair and 7/7 to study the influence dynamics between Islam and Europe, this paper adopts a more grassroots approach by looking at how more frequently occurring encounters between the native people of Luton and an ‘Islamified’ religion have shaped EDL perception and identity politics. I present a case study of this rather tragic phenomenon, tracing its history, analysing the public discourses and highlighting how an ‘Implicated Islam’ stimulated a reactive identity mechanism from the United Peoples of Luton expressed in neo-English terms. By departing from the sensational events to focusing on the tactical level of the social agents, we come closer to contextualizing Islam-European relations with respect to the actual people in their communities, seeing how their perceptions shape their sense of collective identity.
"

""The field encompassed by the four-volume reprint series ‘Religion, Sexuality, and Spirituality’ is a vast and controversial one. It encompasses both normative and non-normative sexual identities and behaviours in the so-called ‘world religions’ (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism) and also such modes of being and conduct in the multitudinous indigenous religions, new religions and spiritualities, and smaller long-established traditions (for example, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Shinto, and so on). Yet the field extends far beyond the relatively unproblematic notions of sexual identities and behaviours in the context of religions and spiritualities. A major subfield concerns the body as site of religio-spiritual beliefs and practices (for example, ideas of cleanness and uncleanness at specific times or due to certain conditions), clothing as signals of sexual virtue or misconduct, and the built environment as gendered and manifesting varying degrees of spatial sacredness (for example, the Second Temple in ancient Jerusalem, with its outer court that was open to non-Jews, and inner courts that were open to Jewish men and women, then Jewish men only, until the final Holy of Holies, which was accessible only to the High Priest and his deity, Yahweh).

Further, research in the area is multi-disciplinary, and encompasses perspectives from religious studies, cultural studies, cultural history, sociology, history, psychology, theology, and a range of other disciplines including human geography, planning, law, health and environmental studies. The field is controversial for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is often misunderstood by traditionally religious people who are offended by the intimate and taboo nature of the subjects under investigation. Secondly, confusion exists among secular scholars, especially those who advocate the separation of sexuality from all forms of religion and spirituality, which they regard as oppressive. Thirdly, the body, sexuality and religion are typically treated in a prurient manner in public discourses such as news media and print journalism.

The series comprises four volumes, which reprint 70 articles and chapters (of which no more than 25% will be chapters from edited volumes). The final shape of the four volumes is not yet definitively known, but is likely to be: Volume 1 (methodology and definition of the field), Volume 2 (historical material, ancient, medieval, early modern etc), Volume 3 (specific case studies from traditional religious groups etc), and Volume 4 (examples from contemporary religions and alternative spiritualities).
""

"In Israel, personal status is regulated through religious law.
This gives Orthodox rabbis the state-sanctioned power to define who is Jewish and to enable and recognize marriage. The impediments that religious law poses to same-sex couples and their children are serious: same-sex couples are excluded from marriage, and their children’s religious status is at risk. In this article, I contrast these rabbinic exclusions with the ways that same-sex couples, both religious and non-religious,
use Jewish traditions to establish social legitimacy and belonging for themselves and their children. Based on ethnographic findings, the article suggests that the Jewish ritual of circumcision for boys and childbirth celebrations for girls are moments in which relationships are reaffirmed. Even more so, the social networks displayed at these events and the participation of religious specialists (mohalim) performing the circumcision carry a clear message: these families are authentically a part of the Jewish-Israeli collective despite rabbinic opposition."

"The following syllabus was used for an advanced course on Gender and Body in Jewish Literature, taught jointly with my spouse. We wanted to combine our interests in Jewish literature throughout the ages, as well as to question the definition of “Jewish texts.” For that purpose, we included Second Temple Jewish authors whose work was not canonized as part of the Jewish tradition, such as the writings of Philo, or the apocryphal Book of Judith. The most notable example in this context is probably the inclusion of selections from the epistles of Paul of Tarsus. Despite the inclusion of his epistles in the New Testament, he remains a Jew who lived before the destruction of the Second Temple. Similarly, our study of Jewish mysticism was not confined to the semi-canonized texts of the Zohar and related literature, but also the more esoteric Shiur Komah, part of the Hekhalot literature. Secular modern Hebrew literature and literature written by or dealing with Jews have long been recognized as Jewish literature, broadening the definition from the religious tradition to the ethnic group. In relation to that we also chose to include the film A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers and a song by Paul Simon, to further broaden the definition of “text.”
The course was intentionally designed to avoid a chronological order or any bias of “canonic” vs. “non-canonic” or “religious” vs. “ethnic” definitions of Judaism. A chronological order might have given the wrong impression of an essentialized development, as well as become a repetition of the Introduction to Judaism course, designed by an historical paradigm. Instead, we organized the course according to three themes:  Body, Gender, and Sexuality. While these topics overlapped throughout the entirety of the course, there is an appropriate sense of progression. We began with the ungendered body, dealing more abstractly with the tension between matter and spirit, then proceeded to various aspects of gender constructions, Jewish patriarchy, misogyny, and the thwarted masculinity of the Jewish body. We concluded with several issues pertaining to sex, some of which mirrored topics from the earlier selections, as in the issue of the relationship between sex and worship that evoked once more questions raised in the second class on God’s body.
In addition to the syllabus, I attach here the timeline and three bibliographies we gave to the students. The timeline is intended to provide the historical framework that the course’s plan refuses to follow. The List of Sources for the syllabus provides full details of all materials used, for those who wish to seek them. Finally, the two bibliographies on the topic, provide further reading, as well as remind us all that the course barely scratched the surface of this fascinating issue."

As part of the Roman religion, the prodigies represented an important role closely linked to the fear they caused to be understood as manifestations of gods with negative character. These were understood to be produced only when humans had taken any action for which they were responsible and that had angered some particular deity, must be atoned for as soon as possible based on rituals perfectly set. The Romans suffered defeats at the hands of Hannibal only understood by them as produced by the loss of the favor of the gods, and in their search to confirm there were reports of numerous miracles which were recorded by Livy.

"The enigma of the sphinx, in itself an apt symbol of the unconscious, is impenetrable due to the ultimately unknowable nature of the unconscious. Many-sidedness is one of the foremost characteristics of the unconscious. Yet it is argued that the psychoanalytic theory of over-determination[1] is inadequate. Unconscious multiformity can give rise to creative expressions in a dream. The dream does not constitute an over-determined content. It is better viewed as the formulation of a wholeness from a composite of motives. An important corollary is that the obsolescent notion of ‘primary narcissism’[2] is understandable as a form of archaic wholeness wherein religiosity and instinctuality exist in an undifferentiated condition. Certain historical expressions of sexual cultic religion can be understood as a return to blissful ‘primary narcissism’.

Keywords: unconscious unknowability, primary narcissism, Oedipus, sphinx, original wholeness, over-determination, primal scene, hieros gamos, cult of sexuality.



"

The article is dedicated to homoerotic passages and motifs of the Bible, firstly from the 1 and 2 Books of Samuel which narrate about relations between David and Jonathan. The principal purpose of the article is to consider mentioned relations both in terms of the key source (Tanakh) and with the engaging of other accounts of ancient Near East (e.g., The Epic of Gilgamesh). Furthermore, the author of the article conducts a survey of recent researches in the Queer Bible Studies with a glance to previous historiography.

"Engaging gender as an important category of analysis in the study of religion is to interrogate, destabilise, and interrupt the ‘business-as-usual’ of the conceptual and organisational assumptions often employed in our highly dynamic yet historically and oft-times structurally androcentric discipline. In the words of Judith Butler (1990: vii), one could arguably say that (en)gendering the study of religion frequently leads “time and again to a certain sense of trouble.” Indeed, in the first editorial of the new online journal Religion and Gender, Anne-Marie Korte states that the journal’s editors see “religion and gender, our two key terms, as an eye-opener, capable of opening up new debates exactly because of their destabilizing, even ‘troubling’ references” (2011: 7). As the academic disciplines of religious and gender studies are conceptually tangled and sprawling skeins of contested discourse and praxis, the drawing together of these two lively areas can, according to Jay Johnston, only create “trouble; trouble for conceptual categories, for binary logics, and for dominant discursive practices” in the interplay of both fields of study (2013: 410).
This interrogative, querying, and troubling sense of the mutual imbrication of religion and gender, however, was surprisingly sidestepped in Lisbeth Mikaelsson’s recent podcast for the Religious Studies Project. Although presenting fascinating insights into the role of feminism in the development of gender studies, the relationship between secularism and socio-cultural gender constructs, and the issues of advocacy, personal commitment, and ethical engagement that inevitably arise in the study of religion and gender, the interview was regrettably (and ironically) permeated by such problematic and often outmoded binaries as man/woman, masculine/feminine, sex/gender, and nature/culture. These erroneous dualisms still exist in certain publications in the field of religious studies, which seem to give little or no recognition to the profound epistemological, methodological, and substantive changes that contemporary gender studies has produced over the last few decades. This response thus seeks to trouble and reflect on these issues and, in a concluding examination of the potentialities of the study of religion and gender, aims to serve as an addendum to the interview. "

This chapter aims to explore points of intersection between the study of Islam, non-heterosexuality, and queer theory. It argues that in examining certain studies of Arab-Muslim, ‘Middle Eastern’ non-normative sexualities, we see the existence of the schismatic view that essentialism and social constructionism are the only two options available for the ontological conception of sexuality. It does so by focusing on a theoretical examination of the discursive matrices of religion, sexuality, and gender present in such historical and socio-anthropological studies, and critically evaluates these dichotomous accounts in regards the historically lived realities of non-normative sexualities and/with Arab-Muslim subjectivities. This chapter then asserts that the utility of a queer theoretical lens allows us to better account for the multiplicity of such sexual positionalities, which either can or cannot be subsumed under ‘Western’ sexual rubrics.