INTRODUCTION

Religion/Sexuality: Politics/Affects

Aaron Goodfellow
Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

In the interest of discussing how religion and sexuality stand beside each other in ways that generate unexpected political and affective fields, the papers assembled here discuss the ways sex and eroticism operate as potentialities in relation to anything religious. Taking their lead from both recent controversies and those that endure and remain volatile within intellectual and religious traditions—periodically erupting into public consciousness and politics—the papers attend to the following broad themes: sacred bodies, eroticism and the cultivation of self, the sexuality of religious personages, iconography and pornography, and the sexuality of gods. The approach stands opposed to more familiar elaboration of the different ways institutional religions regulate and administer sex. Through their explorations of the intimacy found between religion and sex within the weaves of everyday life, the authors bring religion and sexuality into fresh and productive juxtapositions that illuminate aspects of each that are often obscured.

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© borderlands ejournal 2010