xbn .

Category: Body Politics

The representation of political subjectivity entails fundamental assumptions about who has capacity and standing to be an agent. Who counts as a political agent? What commonalities can be political mobilized? Under what significations can such identities become legible? Here we examine the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality and they are mobilized to political and theological ends.

Resources

Bibliography:

  1. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (2000)
  2. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (2008)
  3. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
  4. M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom (2010)
  5. Linn Tonstad, Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics (2018)
  6. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)
  7. Sharon V. Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (2007)
  8. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2011)

Relevant Journal Articles:

  • Timothy McGee, “Against (White) Redemption: James Cone and the Christological Disruption of Racial Discourse and White Solidarity,” Political Theology 18, no. 7 (2017): 542-559
  • Brandy Daniels, “On Ambivalence and (Anti-)Normativity (or, Theology as a Way of Life?),” Political Theology 19, no.8 (2018): 689-697
  • Bruno M. Shah, “Enfleshing Aesthetics: Theological Anthropology in M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom and Mayra Rivera’s Poetics of the Flesh,” Political Theology 20, no. 1 (2019): 48-65
Pacific Resistance Unmasking the Old Normal in the Era of Covid 19

Socially, economically, and politically the time of COVID-19 in the Pacific has been a mixed one. In one way it has been apocalyptic (literally an “uncovering” or “unmasking”); truths about the region’s true political economy can no longer be denied. On the other hand, the COVID-19 era has provided opportunities for governments to “mask” and cover up inconvenient truths of the region.

Challenging the Great Physician: Mental Pathogens and Spiritual Contagion in Late-19th Century America

While for the most part, the field of psychiatry remained immune to and dismissive of Christian attempts to influence them, these conversations led to the incorporation of psychiatric (and sometimes pseudo-psychiatric) modalities into the pastoral counseling movement.

Religious Madness and the Logic of Contagion

By the first decade of the nineteenth century, a new idea had entered the Western world. Psychiatrists, naturalists, politicians, and theologians throughout Europe and North America came to believe that there existed a form of insanity that caused its victims to express false religious opinions, to hold clearly unreasonable religious beliefs, or to dwell too deeply on religious issues.

Contagions, Earthly and Otherwise

According to Burroughs and Gysin, the power of language was the thing. There was something queer, indeed, about the capacity of any language to channel all manner of patterns and directives that had nothing, essentially, to do with the words that comprised that language.

Immersions in a Contagious Summer

Given the history of othering and control of women’s bodies, it may surprise you to learn that the mikveh has become a central site of Jewish feminist, and more recently, queer and trans activism. Across the United States, Canada, and Israel, participants in a grassroots Modern Mikveh Movement have been collectively reclaiming what many have considered to be among the most irredeemable misogynistic forms of bodily disciplining.

Revisiting Reflections on Relics and Contagion in Two Parts

Life after violence and profound loss requires that we find ways to hold and contain that pain. Relics help us do this. As we wrap them in our words, craft beautiful containers, or place them in vitrines, we keep these memories alive. We acknowledge and respect their ongoing presence in our lives.

A Redemptive Reading of Proverbs 31:10-31 in the Context of the Comfort Women

The survivors were oppressed and deprived of their freedom, dignity, identity, womanhood, and youth. However, they are now human rights movement activists, teachers, living testimony of the painful history, and much more.

The Banality of Oppression: Memory, Theology, and the Suffering of Chinese Comfort Women

Remembering a future that is habitable for humanity and receptive to justice requires remembering the inconvenient past that, when surfaced, can threaten the status quo.

The Invention of “Policing” and the Sacralization of the Social

Where the parliamentary organization of the Kingdom took care of the horizontal unity of Crown law, the advent of the new police both represented and ensured its vertical unity, from the streets of Whitechapel to the halls of Westminster.

The Entanglement of Guns and Christianity in U.S. American Life

Born out of the recognition that the place of guns in the United States cannot be adequately explained via statistical data—that qualitative accounts are urgently needed—these approaches aim to understand the logics of self-defense and self-preservation at play in forms of life in which guns have been incorporated.

Preparation, Preservation, and Possibility under Title IX

The structure of Title IX actually bears the right shape of how sexual violence should be addressed, if not the language or content sufficient to address such a horror.

Police, Property, and the Problem of Self-Preservation

In light of contemporary work in black feminism, a critical consideration of police violence shows us that the ostensibly natural right to self-preservation is, in fact, not afforded to certain racialized (namely, black) subject positions.