Religion ans Sexuality in cross-cultutal perspective

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Religion and 
Sexuality in 
Cross-cultural 
Perspective
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Religion and 
Sexuality in 
Cross-cultural 
Perspective
Edited by
Stephen Ellingson and M. Christian Green
| J Routledge
Taylor &. Francis Group 
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 2002 by Routledge 
Published 2013 by Routledge
2 Park Square, M ilton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0 X 1 4 4RN 
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business 
Copyright © 2002 by The Park Ridge Center
Permission has been granted to reprint “Woman Who Stole Her Daughter-in-Law’s Eyes” in 
Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiment: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Copyright © 1986 
The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form 
or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including 
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without per­
mission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Religion and sexuality in cross-cultural perspective / Stephen Ellingson & M. Christian Green, 
editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sex— religious aspects. I. Ellingson, Stephen, 1962- II. Green, M. Christian (Martha 
Christian), 1968-
BL65.S4R455 2002
291.178357— dc21 2002009623
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-94128-0 (pbk)
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
S T E P H E N E L L I N G S O N
Part I/Fecundism, Ideologies of Reproduction, and Sexual Identity
1 Cultural Production and Reproductive Issues
The S ign ificance o f the Charismatic M ovem ent in Nigeria 21
T O L A O L U P E A R C E
2 Sex, Rhetoric, and Ontology
Fecundism as an Ethical Problem 51
W I L L I A M R. L A F L E U R
3 The Mythology of the Masquerading
Post-Menopausal Woman 83
W E N D Y D O N I G E R
Part II/Binary Sexual Categories
4 Beyond Binary Categories
M esoamerican R eligious Sexuality 1 1 1
S Y L V I A M A R C O S
5 The Hijras
An Alternative Gender in Indian Culture 137
S E R E N A N A N D A
VI CONTENTS
6 Mimesis in the Face of Fear
Femm e Queens, Butch Queens, and Gender Play 
in the Houses o f Greater N ewark 
K A R E N M C C A R T H Y BRO WN
Part Ill/Power and Domination
7 Tacit Containment
Social Value, Embodiment, and Gender Practice 
in Northern Sudan 
JA N IC E BODDY
8 Millennial Capitalism, Occult Economies, and 
the Crisis of Reproduction in South Africa 
Further Notes from the Postcolony
JE A N AND JO H N L. C O M A R O F F
Contributors
165
187
223
251
255Index
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank a number of people who have contributed 
to the present volume. First, we would like to thank our colleagues and 
staff at the Park Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith, and Ethics, 
particularly our president, Laurence J. O’Connell, and chief of operations, 
Philip J. Boyle, for providing a rich environment for inquiry into issues 
at the intersection of religion, embodiment, and health. Second, we 
would like to thank the principal investigators who preceded us on the 
Religion, Sexuality, and Public Policy Project, particularly Larry L. 
Greenfield and Kelly Hayes, for their work in convening the workshops 
that produced the papers collected in this volume. Third, we would like to 
thank the larger group of scholars and consultants, beyond the contribu­
tors to this volume, who lent their wisdom to the project at various stages 
in ways that helped shape and develop these essays. Fourth, we would 
like to thank our editor, Nick Street, Gilad Foss, Damian Treffs, Julie Ho, 
and others at Routledge for their quick acknowledgment of the value of 
these essays and their ready assistance in bringing them to publication. 
Finally, we would like to thank the Ford Foundation and the John D. and 
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for their generous funding of the 
Religion, Sexuality, and Public Policy Project and other projects that seek 
to shed light on religion, sexuality, health and other crucial aspects of 
human existence to the end of improving the knowledge, communities, 
lives, and futures of people around the world.
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Introduction
Religion and Sexuality 
in Cross-cultural Perspective
STEPHEN ELLINGSON
The importance of religion as a system of faith and ethics, and above all as a 
structure of meaning, has often been acknowledged. Because religions seek 
to create order and purpose by relating human beings to wider associations 
such as families and social collectives, as well as the natural and supernatu­
ral worlds, they forge webs of connection that situate individuals within 
ever wider schemes of being, imparting at the same time a sense of mean­
ing, value, and direction to human activity. Out of these elements can come 
movements for peace and unity, justice and social reform; from its resources 
healing, love, and respect among humans and their social, natural, and spir­
itual environments may be fostered. Yet, it is important to recognize that 
these very same elements may be at work in some of the most violent inter­
personal, interethnic, and international conflicts around the world.
The rise of fundamentalisms and violent religious fanaticism in places 
as different as Afghanistan and the United States, the systematic rape and 
murder of women in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and countless 
other examples of intrareligious hostilities across the globe, may call into 
question some of our essential notions about religious faith and ethics. 
Some may dismiss these events as politics masquerading as religion, but the 
politicized nature of these events should not deter us from examining 
the kinds of problems at stake as well as the claims being made in the name 
of religion.
2 STEPHEN ELLINGSON
At issue in these conflicts are fundamental questions about human iden­
tity, human community, and perhaps most importantly, the nature and 
purpose of human life—the most central questions of religion. Moreover, 
because religion is involved, and because religions construct webs of rela­
tions that connect individual, communal, ethnic, and national bodies to a 
larger context of extrahuman reality, violence at one level has significance 
at many other levels.
As a primary aspect of existence shared by all human beings, sexuality 
is often central in these conflicts, for it is through our sexuality that we are 
both connected to and differentiated from one another in ever larger cir­
cles of organization, ranging from the individual person to the nation. 
Sexuality is perhaps the most powerful dimension of human life, encom­
passing not only a physical act of intimacy between two persons, but also 
the potential for the creation of new life. But sexuality is more than just the 
simple act of two bodies joining together, more than just a physical sign. 
Sexuality communicates something to others and ourselves about what 
kind of persons we are. Further, because humans are embodied, we expe­
rience the world as sensual and sexual beings; our sexuality extends beyond 
our physicality to encompass all of the ways in which the physical is ren­
dered meaningful. Through gender, through social regimes that construct 
certain sexual identities and acts as normative, the bare facts of anatomy 
are transformed into complex, social, and sexual selves. And through these 
webs of meaning, bodies are linked in social relationships that extend 
beyond the boundaries of the individual to include families, tribes, ethnic 
groups, and societies. Sexuality is the primary ground on which human 
relationships are sanctioned as natural and good, or unnatural and wrong. 
Through ideology, taboo and ritual, sexuality is channeled into those 
behaviors recognized as licit, as opposed to those seen as illicit.1
Sexuality occupies the attentionof many religions because it is a power­
ful way to organize and relate human beings. Thus many religions attempt 
to tame sexuality, to force it to conform to the boundaries that have been 
established to contain it. Sexuality, then, is a central element in the con­
struction of religious meaning. This is seen in the frequent role that sexual 
union between various deities or between deities and humans often plays
INTRODUCTION 3
in cosmogenic myths of the creation of the world. For example, a pre- 
Hispanic Andean myth locates the birth of the world and all its phenom­
ena in the sexual union of the moon goddess and the sun god, a primeval 
pair originally formed by an androgynous supreme being.2 Moreover, 
sexual union between male and female deities provides an important motif 
that constructs certain sexual relationships as normative, and thus repeti­
tive of the original moment of creation, and others as transgressive and 
potentially threatening to cosmological order. Through myths and reli­
gious practices, human sexuality is channeled into socially and religiously 
meaningful avenues that relate bodies to one another in morally legitimate 
and illegitimate ways.3
It is important to note that the appeals that religions make to various 
dimensions of extrahuman reality function as a source of legitimation in 
which religious constructions of sexuality, the family, or gender, are posited 
as natural, sacred, transcendent. Through this process, these constructions 
are rendered meaningful through their position within a larger social and 
cosmological order. Because it operates by appeal to extrahuman sources of 
legitimation, the process of meaning construction may be manifested in the 
violence of religious domination and oppression, or as a contradictory force 
demanding justice and liberation from oppression. In other words, because 
religions couch their formulations as realities extending beyond the human 
capacity for understanding, they are centrally concerned with the use and 
abuse of power. This is the central dialectic uniting all religious struggles, 
one that is too often overlooked or misunderstood. It suggests that what 
relates religion as a system of faith and ethics to religion as a source of vio­
lent conflict is their shared participation in a construction of meaning that 
is simultaneously divinely legitimate and legitimating.
These principles can be seen at work most clearly in the extreme cases 
of religious conflict. In examining these cases, one sees that an essential 
component, and one that many religiously motivated struggles share in 
common, is a preoccupation with defining the nature, purpose, and bound­
aries of human sexuality, especially womens sexuality. In recent years, con­
servative, fundamentalist regimes in places such as Iran, Afghanistan, the 
Sudan, and Saudi Arabia have responded to the invasive encroachment of
4 STEPHEN ELLINGSON
Western-derived economic systems and cultural values by focusing their 
reformist policies on women: instituting restrictive mandatory dress codes, 
outlawing abortion, preventing women from initiating divorce, and 
increasingly eroding womens independence and autonomy by restricting 
their right to vote, work in the public sector, appear in public without a 
male escort, or drive cars.4 In Bosnia-Herzegovina, women have been 
raped and forcibly impregnated as campaigns of ethnic cleansing threaten 
the boundaries of the national body. The United Nations estimates that 
20,000 Bosnian Muslim women have been the victims of torture and rape 
as that nation endures persistent ethnic and religious warfare.5 In Western 
nations such as France and the United States, female genital mutilation has 
become front-page controversy as minority communities battle to preserve 
the vestiges of their tradition and communal identity.
Whether circumscribing sexuality through dress and other restrictive 
measures, appropriating it through rape and sexual assault, or mutilating 
womens bodies to inscribe communal identity, these examples document 
that sexuality, and womens sexuality most of all, is as contested as any 
other national or political terrain. Indeed, they suggest that in many cases, 
womens bodies may become metonymic of larger social bodies such as the 
family or the nation-state or even a religious tradition itself, especially 
where the integrity or tradition of these larger bodies is threatened. And 
this makes sense when we consider that the construction of meaning, both 
religious and social, is predicated on the establishment of relational ties that 
both link and differentiate bodies at different levels of the social order. 
These examples thus powerfully attest to the fact that religions around the 
world have understood human sexuality in particular ways and have 
attempted to shape it accordingly; and further, that the ways that religions 
understand and shape sexuality have consequences for other levels of soci­
ety, impacting not only individuals but families, nations, and cultures. All 
too often, these understandings come into conflict with the meanings given 
to sexuality in other arenas such as the social sciences and medicine, as well 
as in other faiths. Yet these arenas contain their own ideological frame­
works for sexual meanings as well, frameworks that rarely have been ques­
INTRODUCTION 5
tioned. The end result is a situation in which the right to define sexuality 
is disputed in some of the most violent and destructive struggles of our day.
A close examination of the relationship between religion and sexuality 
thus demonstrates that questions of power are central; and, because reli­
gions appeal to extrahuman sources of legitimation, the stakes are high. 
Yet because of this very fact, religions may offer an important space for 
resistance and liberation as well as domination. In a world in which sexual 
possibilities and personas have proliferated, overrunning the boundaries 
that both religions and societies have established to contain them, the 
appeal of religions to the extrahuman realm is one that may be used either 
to reinscribe traditional bounds or to legitimate new ones. The varied 
response to homosexuality in Christian communities is a case in point. 
Some denominations or factions within these bodies tolerate or even wel­
come homosexual parishioners and clergy; other denominations condemn 
homosexuality as a sin controverting the divine order of creation. As these 
examples suggest, the growing significance of new sexual desires, identi­
ties, and politics presents a fundamental challenge to established religious 
traditions, one that may be responded to in a variety of ways but one that 
cannot be ignored.
Decades-long controversies in the United States over teen pregnancy, 
abortion rights, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage suggest that tradi­
tional, religiously based representations of sexuality do not accurately map 
on to the shifting field of social reality. The traditional understandings and 
arrangements that religions brought to the complex topic of sexuality have 
been increasingly challenged by biological and social scientific research, 
new reproductive technologies, gay rights movements, projects of fertility 
regulation and family planning, as well as programs of national and global 
population stabilization based on the empowerment of women and eco­
nomic development. The responses of religious institutions to these devel­
opments and discourses have been diverse—some confrontational, some 
adaptive—yet no tradition has remained indifferent to these challenges. 
All too often the conflicts that have arisen have been characterized by an 
intense fervor on the part of religious participants, who see fundamental
6 STEPHEN ELLINGSON
assumptions about the nature and purpose of human life at stake in these 
challenges, combined with an inattentiveness on the part of policymakers 
about the role of religion in these conflicts. This is perhaps seen mostdra­
matically by the example of the Vatican and certain Muslim organizations’ 
combative response to the Programme o f Action put forth by the United 
Nations’ 1994 International Conference on Population and Development 
at Cairo, where it became clear that secular development concerns have the 
potential to clash with deeply held religious beliefs about the proper forms 
and meaning of human sexuality.
As suggested above, the relationship between religion, sexuality, and 
politics is complex and often leads to unexpected alliances of ideas and 
players as events like the U.N. conference unfold. This reality invites us to 
better understand the role that particular religions play in the construction, 
legislation, and regulation of human sexuality in different places and dif­
ferent times around the world. Yet beyond understanding the claims that 
diverse religions stake in defining human sexuality, these issues of contem­
porary urgency also require a willingness to interrogate Western categories 
and assumptions about sexuality, assumptions that often have roots in the 
West’s ancient, and sometimes deeply buried, religious traditions. Critical 
attention to the ways in which these preconceived notions about “religion” 
and “sexuality” color Western approaches to the sexual culture of other tra­
ditions means excavating the foundations of modern scientific and med­
ical understanding about sexuality. In short, we must recognize that these 
notions are embedded within a historically and culturally discrete matrix 
of Western philosophical and religious ideas.
In this complicated and often murky context, it is clear that a critical 
evaluation of the complex relations between religion and sexuality around 
the world demands fresh ways of conceptualizing these relations, and 
requires the cooperation and dialogue of religious, academic, and policy­
making communities, as well as the inclusion of both local and global 
perspectives. In addition, it necessitates an interrogation of Western pre­
suppositions that have influenced our understanding of both religion and 
sexuality, and a willingness to develop new ways of thinking about the 
issues at the intersection of religion and sexuality in diverse cultures.
INTRODUCTION 7
The essays in this volume were developed during the course of a four- 
year Religion , Sexuality, and Public Policy P roject undertaken at the Park 
Ridge Center for the Study of Health, Faith and Ethics, with funding from 
the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur 
Foundation. The Centers research team brought together a diverse set 
of scholars from the humanities and social sciences to document the ways 
that religions understand human sexuality, to identify how they imple­
ment these understandings through structures of belief and practice, 
and to explain the power of religions to channel sexual behaviors and iden­
tities into morally legitimate and illegitimate forms. The project also 
was designed to explore how Western understandings of sexuality have 
been exported, received, and altered by non-Western religious traditions 
and nations.
After the initial meeting of scholars in 1996, the research staff decided 
to narrow the focus of the project to three specific intersections of religion 
and sexuality: fecundist ideologies of reproduction and their effect on 
sexual identity at different stages of the life cycle; binary sexual and gender 
categories and the ways in which these are constructed, reproduced, and 
transformed; and the power of religions, cultures, states, and global mar­
kets to impose their understandings of sexuality on different social groups, 
thereby producing compliance, resistance, or subversion. The essays are 
organized along these divisions, although they are not confined to them; 
issues of power and sexual identity are important features of the essays on 
ideologies of reproduction, just as reproduction figures in several essays on 
gender and resistance. In the following section of this chapter, I briefly 
review the three areas of research and theory and oudine how each essay 
addresses the broad topic.
Fecundism, Ideologies of Reproduction, and Sexual Identity
The propagation of fecundist ideologies of reproduction includes the 
myriad ways that religions direct sexuality toward the production of off­
spring. It consists of the various strategies that religions employ to insure 
their own perpetuation through the control of their believers’ reproduc­
tive lives. This may include authorizing sexual contact between married
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8 STEPHEN ELLINGSON
persons for the primary purpose of conception, as in the official Catholic 
position; or a focus on the religious value of producing many children, as 
in Orthodox Judaism and historical Mormonism; or a religiously sanc­
tioned emphasis on the production of male children, as in many Muslim 
countries as well as in India and China. It may also include religiously 
based prohibitions against certain types of sexual practices, such as sodomy 
or oral sex, that either do not lead directly to reproduction, or are believed 
to interfere with it by diverting sexual energy to nonreproductive activities.
In addition to such explicit commands as “be fruitful and multiply,” 
religions may also employ a range of more subtle strategies designed to 
promote “proper” reproduction. These may include purity laws that spec­
ify that a woman not impede her regular menstrual flow, and thus the pos­
sibility of conception, through the use of female barrier contraceptives, as 
in some Muslim societies, or ritual taboos that prescribe the separation of 
menstruating or pregnant women from certain spaces and activities such 
as the site and labor of food preparation. They may consist of beliefs about 
male and female bodies that become especially problematic at the time of 
pregnancy and parturition. For example, in New Guinea, womens bodies 
are seen as a source of permanent defilement particularly threatening to 
male fetuses, which, once born, must be ritually cleansed and reincorpo­
rated into the male community.6 Alternatively religious theories of fertil­
ity and conception may place responsibility for desired birth outcomes on 
women and their purity, and thus may develop practices such infibulation 
and possession cults in order to ensure purity and account for stillbirths and 
the births of girls.7 All of these ideas have important consequences for the 
social and religious lives of men and women as they define the sexual roles 
for individuals and thus channel reproductive behavior.
Tola Olu Pearces essay examines how the ideology and practices of 
Charismatic Christianity in Nigeria are changing the institutions that 
foster reproduction—marriage, family, and health care. She explains how 
the centrality of the home, as the basic unit of the church and hence soci­
ety—and church practices that teach and promote this belief—lead Char- 
ismatics to challenge the prevailing sexual culture that both allows for sex 
outside of marriage (at least for men), and teaches woman that sex is a
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INTRODUCTION
wife’s duty and marriage primarily intended to produce children and 
increase the size of the patrilineage. At the same time, their religious beliefs 
about the nature of the Christian family and the sacredness of life leads 
them to selectively use contraception (only those methods that are not abor- 
tifacients), to limit family size, in contradistinction to many of their non- 
Charismatic neighbors. Moreover, church groups often discuss family 
planning, marital problems, and the relationship of the nuclearfamily to 
the extended family in ways that challenge the beliefs and practices of tra­
ditional Yoruba culture and Orthodox Christianity.
Taking a history of religions approach rather than a sociological one, 
William R. LaFleur writes about the absence of a fecundist tradition 
within Buddhism. He argues that many traditional Buddhists tended to 
see reproduction as interfering with the practice of Buddhism, especially 
for clergy. That is, individuals should refuse to be productive so that “the 
pursuit of enlightenment or a good Karmic record” won’t be prevented by 
the obligations of family. A concern that heterosexual sex might result in 
children helps to explain the relatively easier acceptance or toleration of 
homosexuality in Buddhism’s history. LaFleur places this history in the 
context of the battle over reproduction at 1994 Cairo conference on popu­
lation and development and the possible challenge of Buddhism to the 
dominate ideology of fecundism promulgated by many religious delegates.
The essay by Wendy Doniger focuses on the sexual identities of women 
in terms of the mythic portrayal of postmenopausal and young, fertile 
women in a variety of cultures. She traces how the oppositions of youth 
and age, fertility and barrenness, beauty and ugliness are played out in dif­
ferent mythological systems and how these gendered identities structure 
the relationships between men and women and young women and old 
women. She also identifies an alternative mythological system that deval­
ues youth and fertility in favor of old age and shows how these various 
representations of women’s identities are tied to religious understandings 
of truth and power. Doniger’s chapter highlights the ways in which myths 
operate to contest and reproduce fecundist social orders. It also serves as a 
bridge to the next section as it unpacks how these myths are structured 
around such binary categories such as fertility and barrenness, and perhaps
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10 STEPHEN ELLINGSON
more importantly, shows how the construction of certain binary classifica­
tion schemes can disrupt or subvert hegemonic binary codes.
Binary Sexual Categories
Religions are instrumental in the construction of sexual identities and gen­
dered social selves, a process closely linked to the implementation of ide­
ologies of reproduction. The assumption that sexuality and sexual behavior 
is differentiated along the lines of anatomy and gender structures many 
religions’ understandings of human sexuality. The tendency to polarize 
social life into two categories—male and female, divine and human, fertile 
and barren, heterosexual and homosexual—may characterize human cul­
ture as a whole. Yet what is concealed in these oppositional formulations is 
the hierarchical relation between each term, as well as the correspondences 
that relate individual sets of terms within a larger framework. That is to 
say, male is defined in distinction to female, yet is intimately related to her, 
for his social role depends upon the exclusion of certain characteristics, 
behaviors and traits to her domain and the incorporation of others as his 
own, often in a relationship of unmarked to marked. This is the case for 
other oppositional sets as well.
However, close attention to the larger cultural context in which these 
oppositional formulations are embedded reveals that the unmarked term 
in each set is often related to the unmarked term of other sets through 
intersecting discourses of race, gender, sex, and class, as well as more specif­
ically religious discourses and practices. For example, in the Catholic con­
text, male is homologized to a paternal and all-powerful god through 
iconographic depictions, linguistic representations, and doctrinal formula­
tions as well as theological positions that exclude women from the priest­
hood. Another set of religious discourses identifies masculinity with 
heterosexuality by excluding all forms of male sexual expression beyond 
the bounds of a procreatively oriented union with a female. These religious 
formulations overlap with other culturally dominant patterns that con­
struct white, heterosexual maleness as the standard, a standard whose 
rights and privileges are upheld as intrinsic to the normative, social order.
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INTRODUCTION II
Yet, cross-cultural study has shown that multiple categories of gender 
and alternative sexualities have been present in many times and in many 
places around the globe, arrangements that may have little to do with mar­
riage and the production of children. Among the Sambia of New Guinea, 
for example, male homosexual activity was historically sanctioned as a 
potent means for the ritual transferal of masculine power, via the agency 
of semen, between older male elites and pubertal adolescents.8 Adoles­
cent sexual activity in this context was limited to participation as a passive 
partner in homosexual activity for the purposes of receiving the seminal 
emission of an adult male, a process that was believed to be essential to 
successful physical maturation and sperm production. Conversely, the 
repertory of adult male sexuality included homosexual activity within a 
specific ritual context; once an adolescent had gained the status of adult­
hood, passive homosexuality was replaced by active. Cross-cultural evi­
dence demonstrates that practices forbidden by some religious traditions 
may be legitimated in the ritual life of other traditions. Exploring these 
alternative constructions of sexuality and their cultural contexts is the first 
step toward illuminating the multiple ways that religions articulate, define, 
legitimate, and restrict sexual expression, as well as the exercise of power 
this process serves. This cross-cultural data also demonstrates that sexual­
ity can be liberatory in certain times and places as well, suggesting that this 
dimension of our shared humanity may offer the ground for resistance as 
well as domination.
The binarism of sexual personas has not only informed thinking about 
gender roles and the family, but has also shaped reproductive technologies 
as well as religious positions on such contentious issues as same-sex rela­
tionships and adolescent sexuality. The ideologies and practices that keep 
these binaries in place, both proscriptively by funneling sexual identity into 
one of two categories, and punitively by legislating against any blurring of 
binary distinctions, are central concerns of most religious traditions. 
Additionally, the model of sexual dimorphism predominant in the West 
has also influenced its understanding of other religions and cultures, often 
obscuring the multiple categories of sexuality present in many times and
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12 STEPHEN ELLINGSON
in many places around the world. Sexual relations are a product of indi­
vidual cultures, yet the Western model has been objectified, naturalized, 
and universally applied to interpret sexuality and sexual expression glob­
ally, resulting in the condemnation of alternate constructions of sexuality. 
Cross-cultural studies of multiple sex and multiple gender systems have 
illustrated that this dimorphic system is neither natural nor universal, thus 
calling into question policies that have rested upon its hidden assumptions 
and power relations.9
The essays in this section focus on alternative gender identities and how 
the binary categories of male and female are challenged in Mesoamerica, 
India, and the United States. Sylvia Marcos writes about the ways in which 
Mesoamerican cosmology defined the body and gender such that a strict 
dichotomy betweenmale and female was virtually unknown among the 
Nahua Aztecs. In her essay on gender in Indian culture, Serena Nanda 
compares dominant and alternative constructions of gender in Hinduism 
and Islam. She focuses on the Hijras, a group of eunuchs, who embody 
both male and female characteristics and represent a third sex or third 
gender. Nanda discusses the religious foundations and importance of Hijra 
identity, as well as their social and ritual roles in Hinduism. Finally, Karen 
McCarthy Brown studies the “voguing” balls in Newark, New Jersey, as a 
site where alternative gender constructions—butch queen and femme 
queen—are constructed and contested among African-Americans and 
Hispanics. She discusses how the balls serve as a substitute space for reli­
gious or spiritual experience as most participants have rejected or been 
rejected by Christianity.
The essays in this section identify the important ways in which sexual 
power is exercised, often in unexpected or subversive ways. The Hijras, 
who are castrated, should be sexually and socially powerless in their soci­
ety, yet are able to transform impotence into generativity through asceti­
cism. Brown shows how the practitioners of voguing engage in “tactical 
resistance” and thereby upend, at least temporarily, the taken-for-granted 
understandings of gender categories. The essays also explain how sacred 
texts and religious rituals are central to the creation of alternative gender 
identities and the exercise of sexual power.
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INTRODUCTION 13
Power and Domination
The essays in this section focus on the power relations that organize and 
determine religious understandings of human sexuality. The starting point 
for thinking about the relationship between religion, sexuality, and power 
is the variety of means through which religions convince their participants, 
and often the larger society, that their system of order is natural, divine, just, 
or good. This includes the use of coercion and force as well as more subde 
strategies that inculcate obedience and acceptance and nullify opposition.
Historically, Christianity has powerfully shaped sexual expression by 
defining a limited set of morally legitimate behaviors and identities— 
namely heterosexual marriage and celibacy. Institutionally the Church 
used a number of strategies to ensure compliance ranging from official 
doctrines that define some expressions of sexuality as being morally incom­
patible with Christianity to rituals that legitimize particular sexual identi­
ties and relationships.10Although these strategies often failed in practice, 
the Church’s power over sexuality was not weakened seriously until the 
twentieth century with the liberalization of attitudes about sex and the 
development of reproductive technologies that broke the tight connection 
between sex and procreation.
The rise of fundamentalism around the world has led to the develop­
ment of a constellation of power and sexuality that challenges the more lib­
eral beliefs and practices characteristic of western societies. Taking place in 
many different social and religious contexts, fundamentalisms are charac­
terized by a conservative social agenda often cloaked as a return to tradi­
tional sexual mores and roles. They frequendy target women, whose status 
and autonomy have often undergone rapid change as a result of urbaniza­
tion and industrial development, as embodiments of social and moral 
decline. This has led many to posit that fundamentalisms can best be 
understood as radical protest movements against the increasing egalitari­
anism of the sexes in societies undergoing accelerated and unequal devel­
opment. Perhaps what most characterizes fundamentalist movements is 
their focus on women’s sexuality as a source of danger that requires strict 
policing and subjection to male control. The strategies that fundamentalist
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STEPHEN ELLINGSON
movements employ, from requiring modest dress to violence directed 
toward nonconforming women (as has occurred most recendy in the beat­
ing of women in Afghanistan), perhaps demonstrate the greatest range of 
the exercise of overt power on fundamentalism and gender.11
Another area in which religions have exercised the powers of sur­
veillance and control is the body.12 Genital mutilation, circumcision, and 
scarification are common practices that inscribe religious and cultural 
ideals—ideals about propriety, morality, and beauty—upon bare flesh. 
Analogously, veiling and adornment communicate salient notions about 
sexuality and its proper forms. The various cultural and religious mean­
ings given bodies, and the ways that they are marked as sexed bodies, 
are important modes through which ideologies of reproduction, gender, 
and sexuality are instantiated in concrete practices. These practices also 
illuminate the various ways in which religion and culture may cooperate 
to profoundly constrain sexual expression, especially for women.
Janice Boddys essay in the third section examines the competing under­
standings of infibulation among a Muslim group in Northern Sudan. In 
her ethnographic account, she identifies why men equate infibulation with 
sexuality and thus as necessary practice to preserve family honor and social 
capital. Conversely, women code it in terms of fertility—as the means to 
preserve “moral motherhood.” Infibulation serves to protect family and 
village from internal and external sources of pollution, although Boddy 
notes that a group of young women in the village who have been educated 
since the 1989 Islamist coup in Sudan are challenging many of the religious 
practices surrounding infibulation and thus challenging its hegemony.
Boddys chapter frames power, less in terms of its repressive features, 
but rather its authorizing capacities as she critically draws on the insights 
of Foucault and Bourdieu.13 This theoretical stance on power also informs 
the chapter by Jean and John Comaroff. Both essays shift the locus from 
religion to other social institutions—the state and the economy—and dis­
cuss how institutional efforts to regulate religious practice and sexual 
expression become the means by which indigenous peoples resist and 
undermine the exercise of institutional power. The Comaroffs’ chapter
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INTRODUCTION 15
looks at the reinvigoration of witchcraft in northern South Africa in the 
mid-1990s and the tie of witchcraft to ritual murder and the harvesting 
and sale of human body parts (part of a larger trend affecting Europe and 
Latin America). They demonstrate how African witchcraft beliefs con­
cretize the larger, abstract forces of global capitalism by portraying them 
as nefarious forces of the demonic. Situated at the nexus of these greater 
market forces, market women as well as politicians are frequendy thought 
to practice witchcraft. Like the abstract and dehumanizing power of the 
market, which extract labor from noncompliant bodies, witches are seen 
to drain the lifeblood of their victims and to control the means and modes 
of production. Modern witchcraft is thus a discourse about and a com­
mentary on the commodification of social relations and the alienability of 
the human body, whose parts are rendered up to feed the global capitalist 
economy.
The essays in this collection contribute to the emergent subfield of the 
anthropology of sex and gender. In a recent essay, Carole Vance notes that 
anthropology has been slow to take up the study of sexuality, unsure of its 
legitimacy as a field of study.14 In general, anthropologists did not make 
the sexual turn until the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and 1990s, and when 
they did, they relied heavily on theories and concepts from the fieldsof 
feminist and queer studies, history, and social constructionism. Currently 
there are two overlapping areas of research and theorizing that inform 
the essays in this collection: 1 ) the nexus of bodies, sexual identities and 
cultures; 2) theories of gender and power.15 Work in the former area often 
challenges the universality of western understandings of the body and 
sexual identities through crosscultural comparisons. It often seeks to 
explain how sexual and gender systems in different countries operate, how 
gender or sexuality identity are inscribed on the body, or how homosex­
uality is imagined, practiced and given meaning in non-Western cultures.16 
Some work in the latter area examines the social construction of gender in 
different societies and the consequences of those constructions on the lives 
of women; other work explores how power is exercised and contested 
around reproduction and womens health issues, homosexuality, AIDS,
16 STEPHEN ELLINGSON
and the medicalization of sexuality.17
These nine essays build on these two broad areas of anthropological 
inquiry, but with particular attention to the place and impact of religion. 
In this regard, they make a significant contribution to a literature that often 
has neglected religion, and they point to three new directions for future 
research. First, as few anthropological accounts place religion at the center 
of their analyses, these essays make an important contribution to the 
anthropology of sex and gender by examining the relationship between 
sexuality and religious practices and organizations. Second, several essays 
not only explore the gendered dimensions of sexuality but demonstrate 
how particular religious ideologies bolster or subvert the broader gender 
and sexual ideologies of a particular culture. This focus on the relationship 
between sacred and secular dimensions of sexuality reveals new insights 
into the nature of social power, resistance, and reproduction. It suggests 
that more work needs to be done that moves beyond Foucaults totalizing 
understanding of power. Third, many of the essays, at least implicitly, 
are concerned with explaining the exercise of human agency given the 
constraints of culture, state, market, and religion. They challenge the pas­
sive conception of agency endemic in much of neostructuralism, but 
because none of the essays offers a new theory of agency, and sexual agency 
in particular, they suggest that this might be the next area for empirical 
study and theorizing.
Notes
1. On the construction of taboos and ideologies that define and constrain sexu­
ality, see Gayle S. Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the 
Politics of Sexuality,” in Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader, eds. Richard 
Parker and Peter Aggleton (London: UCL Press, 1999).
2. Brian S. Bauer and Charles Stanish, Ritual and Pilgrimage in the Ancient Andes: 
The Islands o f the Sun and the Moon (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
3. On the role of religious organizations to channel sexual identities and prac­
tices or to shape public moral discourse about sexuality, see Darren E. Sherkat 
and Christopher G. Ellison, “The Cognitive Structure of a Moral Crusade:
INTRODUCTION 17
Conservative Protestantism and Opposition to Pornography,” Social Forces 75 
(March 1997): 957-82; Larry May and James Bohman, “Sexuality, Masculinity, 
and Confession,” Hypatia 12 (Winter, 1997): 138-54; Keith Hartman, 
Congregations in Conflict: The Battle Over Sexuality (New York: Routledge,
1996); Mary McClintock Fulkerson, “Gender—Being It or Doing It? The 
Church, Homosexuality, and the Politics of Identity,” in Que(e)rying Religion, 
eds. Gary David Comstock and Susan E. Henking (New York: Continuum,
1997); Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the 
Present (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
4. See, generally, the essays in Jane H. Bayes and Nayereh Tohidi (eds.) 
Globalization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics o f Womens Rights in Catholic 
and Muslim Contexts (New York: Palgrave, 2001) and Rita Mae Kelly et al 
(eds.) Gender, Globalization, and Democratization (New York: Rowman and 
Littlefield, 2001).
5. Minh T. Vo, “Ending Rape as a Weapon of War,” Christian Science Monitor, 
April 25,2000.
6. See Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians o f the Flute: Idioms o f Masculinity (New York: 
McGraw- Hill, 1981.)
7. See Janice Body, Wombs and Alien Spirits (Madison: University of Wisconsin 
Press 1989); Rosalind Morris, “ALL MADE UP: Performance Theory and 
the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender,” Annual Review o f Anthropology 
24 (1995): 575-79.
8. Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians o f the Flutes.
9. See Gilbert H. Herdt, Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism 
in Culture and History (New York: Zone Books, 1994); Gilbert H. Herdt, 
Same Sex, Different Cultures: Exploring Gay and Lesbian Lives (Boulder: 
Westview Press, 1997). June Machover Reinisch and Stephanie A. Sanders 
(eds.) Masculinity/Femininity: Basic Perspectives (New York: Oxford University 
Press, 1987).
10. William L. Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New 
Testament and Their Implications fo r Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988); 
Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in 
Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Robin 
Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality: Contextual Background fo r 
Contemporary Debates (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983); John Boswell, 
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 1980).
18 STEPHEN ELLINGSON
11. See John Stratton Hawley (ed.) Fundamentalism and Gender (New York: 
Oxford University Press, 1994); Helen Hardarcre, “The Impact of Funda­
mentalism on Women, the Family, and Interpersonal Relations,” in Fun­
damentalism and Society, (eds.) Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Shahla Haeri, “Obedience 
versus Autonomy: Women and Fundamentalism in Iran and Pakistan,” in 
Fundamentalism and Society, edited by Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby 
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
12. See, e.g., Jane Marie Law (ed.) Religious Reflections on the Human Body 
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995).
13. Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (New 
York: Vintage Books, 1980); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline o f a Theory o f Practice 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and The Logic o f Practice 
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
14. Carole S. Vance, “Anthropology Rediscovers Sexuality: A Theoretical 
Comment,” in Culture, Society and Sexuality, eds. Richard Parker and Peter 
Aggleton (London: UCL Press, 1999).
15. A third area of theory and research focuses on HIV/AIDS, sexual risk and 
sexual diseases (see, for example, Richard Parker “Sexual Cultures, HIV 
Transmission, and AIDS Prevention,” AIDS 8 (supplement, 1994):” S308-14); 
“’Within Four Walls:’ Brazilian Sexual Culture and HIV/AIDS,” in Culture, 
Society and Sexuality, eds. Richard Parker and Peter Aggleton (London: UCL 
Press, 1999).
16. For an overview see, Rosalind D. Morris, “ALL MADE UP,” 567—92; See also 
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of 
Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology o f Women, ed. R. Reiter (New York: Monthly 
Review Press, 1975); Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men and 
the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 
1989); Herdt, Guardians o f the Flutes; Herdt, Ritualized Homosexuality in 
Melanesia; Herdt, Third Sex, Third Gender.
17. For overviews see, Richard Parker, Regina Maria Barbosa, and Peter Aggleton 
(eds.) Framing the Sexual Subject: The Politics o f Gender, Sexuality, and Power 
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); Faye 
Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, “The Politics of Reproduction,” Annual Review o f 
Anthropology, 20 (1991):311^43.