Religion, Gender and Body Politics Post-secular, post-colonial and queer perspectives — Utrecht University, February 12-14, 2015

Call for Papers: Religion, Gender and Body Politics
Post-secular, post-colonial and queer perspectives

International conference on behalf of the international research project
“Interdisciplinary Innovations in the Study of Religion and Gender:
Postcolonial, Post-secular and Queer Perspectives”, at Utrecht
University, The Netherlands, 12-14 February 2015.

Introduction

As sign and site of individual and collective identity profiling the
human body has gained increasing importance and attention in today’s
culturally and religiously diverse societies. Worldwide many ideological
conflicts on the management of diversity and the role of religion in the
public sphere are being played out on ‘the body’. This is especially the
case in the aftermath of 9/11, when religion re- appeared in the public
arena in an unexpected and controversial form, often related to disputes
about the role and place of Islam in Western societies. Subjects of
debate have not only become religious dress (hijab, burqa, kippa), but
also other body-related cultural and religious practices, such as male
and female circumcision, food regulations (e.g., ritual slaughter and
religious fasting), conventional gendered social behaviour in the public
sphere (e.g., physical greeting gestures) and daily religious practices
(e.g., the presence of prayer rooms for Muslims in public buildings such
as schools). Also the integrity and possible violation of the human body
figure as important signposts in controversies over the acceptability of
religious conventions and behaviour (e.g., sexual abuse, corporal
punishments). Finally, in public expressions of feminist activism,
sometimes against the religious establishment (e.g., Femen, Pussy Riot),
the body is – again – an important messenger, tool or sign.

The fierceness of debates concerning the public bodily expression of
religion – in particular Islam – conceals the fact that bodies in
present-day society are governed, regulated, shaped and represented in
many ways, often unrelated, or even in opposition, to religion. For
instance, by subjecting oneself to ‘self-care regimes’ (Bauman 1992) by
visiting gyms, spas and organic food stores, one can acquire the
‘physical capital’ (Bourdieu 1998) necessary to display the fit and
healthy body that has become the dominant model of our times and that is
encouraged through government-sponsored sports programs, television
commercials and real-life shows (e.g. My Big Fat Diet Show). As
Schilling (1993) argues, the central position of the body within
contemporary ‘somatic society’ (Turner 1992) reflects a number of social
insecurities. Women’s emancipation has led to uncertainty about gender
roles and, consequently, the over-emphasis of traditional expressions of
masculinity and femininity; medical interventions prolong life but lead
to insecurities about death and the struggle against mortality and its
effect on the body; and technological innovation leads to questions
about the limits and boundaries of what actually constitutes the human
body. Not only does the earlier mentioned excessive focus on religious
bodily practices conceal the fact that there are more general cultural
insecurities about embodiment at work, it also conceals the fact that in
practice the boundaries between “religious” and “secular” bodily
practices are often blurred.

Conference Description: Aims and Perspectives

In this conference we want to explore why and how the gendered body has
become a highly contested and constitutive site of dynamic secular and
religious (identity) politics, ideologies and practices in contemporary
societies worldwide. In this we suggest to regard the body as
simultaneously an empirical entity (e.g., the human or animal body), a
discursive practice (e.g., the body politics or the body of Christ), and
a focus of technologies of the self (e.g., ecstatic or ascetic bodies).

The body as a contested site in contemporary societies is often the body
of a gendered, sexual, religious or ethnic other (e.g., women, LGBT’s,
migrants, or colonial others). These discursive practices of “othering”
presuppose a clearly defined “we” superior to the “other”, thereby
reinforcing related dichotomies (e.g., West-East, male-female,
religious-secular, straight-gay) and their power relations. The
disciplining of bodily practices appears to take place mainly at the
level of institutionalised religion and secularism where ideologies and
politics of gender, sexuality and ethnicity are imposed. However, when
we look at how people live their bodies, creative and non-normative body
practices can be identified that question, resist or inform these
ideologies and politics. The deconstruction of the normative regulation
and representation of the body should therefore not be investigated
along the lines of the public-private divide, but in a manner that
questions this divide and that is attentive to the ways in which lived
religion and lived secularism permeate the until recently virtually
uncontested boundaries between the visible, public and institutional on
the one hand and the invisible, private and personal on the other.

We aim to question the ways in which intersecting ideologies of
religion, secularism and gender materialise through individual and
collective body-politics drawing from a range of contemporary critical
perspectives in the humanities and qualitative social sciences, such as
postcolonial criticism, post- secularism and queer theories. With these
critical perspectives, we want to challenge persisting dichotomies in
the study of religion and gender, like the public/private and
religious/secular binaries, and Western and heteronormative dominant
models of knowledge. Attached to this email and on the website of the
international research project “Interdisciplinary Innovations in the
Study of Religion and Gender: Postcolonial, Post-secular and Queer
Perspectives”, the project this conference is part of, you can find the
call for papers with a more detailed discussion of these critical
perspectives in the study of religion and gender:
http://projectreligionandgender.org/callforpapers

Key-notes

Minoo Moallem, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of
California, Berkeley
Yvonne Sherwood, Professor of Biblical Studies and Politics, University
of Kent
Ulrike Auga, Professor of Theology and Gender Studies, Humboldt
University, Berlin
Scott Kugle, Associate Professor of South Asian and Islamic Studies,
Emory University, Atlanta
Sarojini Nadar, Professor of Gender and Religion, University of
KwaZulu-Natal
Please find the preliminary program with key-note lectures attached to
this email and on our website: http://projectreligionandgender.org/programme

Call for papers

At this conference we welcome contributions that:

· use theoretical approaches drawing from insights in post-secular,
postcolonial, queer and gender theories, clarifying body practices as a
contested site of religious and secular practices;

· either theoretically or empirically challenge the secular/religious
and public/private binaries in understanding contemporary body politics;

· do not only explore expressions and accounts of ideal religious and
secular practices and norms, but also their manifold articulations with
all the lived ambiguities and ambivalences;

· suggest, imagine or develop innovative methodologies in order to
understand the complex ways in which religious and secular identities
are formed through bodily practices.

Moreover, at this conference we encourage an interdisciplinary approach,
welcoming insights from, amongst others, gender studies, men and
masculinity studies, disability studies, theology, religious studies,
anthropology, history, literature, cultural studies and media studies.

Organisers

This conference is organised as the final event of the international
research project “Interdisciplinary Innovations in the Study of Religion
and Gender: Postcolonial, Post-secular and Queer Perspectives”. This
project was initiated and coordinated by prof. dr. Anne-Marie Korte
(Utrecht University) and dr. Adriaan van Klinken (University of Leeds).
The conference will also host the celebratory launch of the newly
established ‘International Association for the Interdisciplinary Study
of Religion and Gender’ (IARG).

Practical Information

Panel sessions
· Paper or panel proposals need to be submitted on the project website
before 1 December 2014 (http://projectreligionandgender.org/submission).
The conference organisation will inform all applicants about its
decision before 15 December 2015.

· Individual paper proposals should include your name and institutional
affiliation, the title of your paper and an abstract of max. 250 words.

· Besides individual papers it is also possible to submit proposals for
a pre-arranged panel session of one and a half hour. A panel consists of
maximum three to four paper presentations. Please provide the following
information (max. 1.000 words): title of the panel session; name of the
chair of the panel session; names, titles and abstracts of the papers.

Poster sessions
· There is also the possibility to present your research via a poster
presentation. Poster proposals need to be submitted on the project
website before 1 December 2014
(http://projectreligionandgender.org/submission). The conference
organisation will inform all applicants about its decision before 15
December 2015.

· Poster proposals should include your name and institutional
affiliation, the title of your poster and an abstract of max. 100 words.

· During the ceremony on the second day (see programme), a prize of
€200,- will be awarded for the best poster presentation.

Finances
· The conference fee is €200,- and includes an annual membership of the
International Association for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion
and Gender (IARG).

· For students or researchers with a low budget, we can provide a small
reduction of the conference fee.

Contact
· For more information you can contact the project assistant Jorien
Copier (projectreligionandgender@gmail.com).