Religion in Sex/uality & Gender Roles:

Compatibility Questioned

ANTHRO 287: Sex & Culture

Bu Villanueva
ARTICLES:

1. Professor Robert Thornton. ‘Sex’, ‘networks’, HIV, and religion: Basic concepts
concerning the value of sex and its exchange in networks. Department of
Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
 CONFERENCE PRESENTATION: Sexuality, AIDS and religion: transnational dynamics in Africa,
(Oxford, 28-30 September 2011)

2. Claudia Schippert. Implications of Queer Theory for the Study of Religion and
Gender: Entering the Third Decade Religion and Gender, vol. 1, no. 1 (2011), 66-84
Publisher: Igitur Publishing (Utrecht). www.academia.edu: www.religionandgender.org
3. Lykke V. Bjørnøy. Are homosexuals impure according to Sunni Islam?
www. antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2009/anthropology_islam_and_homosexuality
4. Thomas G. Lederer, M.A.. CELIBACY IS THE ISSUE. November 1992
www.arthurstreet.com/celibacy1993.html
5. Libay Linsangan Cantor. Forcible Homonormativity and the (Truly Free) Lesbian
Existence, 13 September 2006 
http://www.isiswomen.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=259&Itemid=144

6. Tracey R. Rich. Kosher Sex. http://www.jewfaq.org/sex.htm, 1995-2011

7. Barbara O’Brien. Sex and Buddhism. tantricyogatechniques.com/sex-and-buddhism/
A. Religion vis-a-vis sex: Religion or practices of religion
provide moral norms / codes of behavioral conduct.

B. When sex is accepted by religion - acceptability

parameters on SEX: Positive & significant sexual activities
recognized by varied religion are culturally universal,
almost.

C. When sex is considered a SIN: Cultural binary concepts

on MORAL ISSUES & behaviour differentiation vis-à-vis
Good and Evil: Correct (sexual) Conduct vs. Misconduct,
Heteronormativity vs. Homonormativity & Gender Roles

D. Why norms on sex as created and regulated by religion

are difficult to observe: the Compatibility Question
A. Religion vis-a-vis sex: Religion or practices of religion provide
moral norms / codes of behavioral conduct.

Most world religions have sought to address moral

issues that arise from people's sexuality in society and
in human interactions.

A society's sexual norms-standards of sexual conduct -

can be linked to religious beliefs, or social and
environmental conditions, or all of these.

 Why should sex appear to be a ‘moral issue’?

 Why should religion in particular (instead of law, politics,
administration, or just ‘custom’) be so concerned with sex
regulation?
 What is the moral role of abstinence (or ‘erotic asceticism’) in
religion’s use of sex and sexuality?
Sexual and religious values have been described as ‘ultimate values.’
 referred to as having: at the beginning and end of life;
 ‘ultimate’ - understood as ‘intrinsic’, in-born, or ‘natural’, and stand at
the apex of other value hierarchies
 sexual motives and religious motives share this status.
 Sexual and religious experiences in particular are forms of occulted
sociality. (sacred, profane, polluted, holy, dirty & erotic)

Because of this, sexual and religious social forms have both been
called ‘elementary forms’ of social life in the social sciences.
(studies on Elementary Forms of Religious Life by Durkheim & Levi-Strauss’
Elementary Structures of Kinship)

Ironically, even if sex and religion seem to occupy a similar place in

the social sciences, and have other features in common, sexual and
religious motives seem constantly in conflict.
B. When sex is accepted by religion:
RELIGION acceptability parameters on SEX - Positive &
significant sexual activities recognized by varied religions
are culturally universal, …almost.

1. Tibetan sexual customs

2. Sexual Ethics of Buddhism

a. Refrain from Sexual Misconduct (priests & nuns: no sexual
activity of any kind)
b. Marriage or sexual bonds (chastity for mature males )
c. Birth control & abortion: every child is a potential BUDDHA
d. Homosexuality: regarded as a virtue because it meant that a
monk had completely conquered sexual attachment to
women
3. The Purpose and Meaning of Sex in Judaism
(Abrahamic Religion)
KOSHER SEX
a. The primary purpose of sex is to reinforce the marital bond
b. Sexual desire is not evil, but must be satisfied in the proper
time, place and manner
c. The requirement of marriage before sex ensures sense of
commitment and responsibility.

“And God saw all that He made, and found it very good”
(Gen. 1:30). This goodness includes sexual activity. After
creating human beings, God blesses them and tells them,
“Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it” (Gen.
1:28). Thus sexual activity is a basic part of God’s creation;
as such it must be good.

Sex is the woman's right, not the man's.

C. When sex is considered a SIN:
Cultural binary concepts on MORAL ISSUES & behaviour
differentiation vis-a-vis Good and Evil.
• Correct (sexual) Conduct vs. Misconduct; Heteronormativity vs.
Homonormativity; Gender Roles

 Morality vs. Immorality

What Buddhism teaches about Morality

 Sodomy or Homosexuality:
1. Are homosexuals impure according to Sunni Islam?
2. Sexual relations between men are clearly forbidden by the
Torah
3. Monastic same-sex love

 Heteronormativity & Homonormativity vis-à-vis

Queer Theology & Gender Roles
SIN: Sodomy or Homosexuality

1. Are homosexuals impure according to Sunni Islam?

a. “if everyone was a homosexual, the world would go under” (because
there would be no reproduction)
b. Grand sodomy is the action that takes place between two men and
requires death of both participants (Wright & Rawson 1997:116). Petty
sodomy is anal sex between a man and a woman.

2. Sexual relations between men are clearly forbidden by the Torah

Homosexual acts are forbidden, not homosexual orientation.
Judaism focuses on a person's actions rather than a person's desires.

3. Monastic same-sex love (Buddhism)

a. Nanshoku relationships inside monasteries were typically pederastic - an
age-structured relationship where the younger partner is not considered
adult.
b. There was no religious opposition to homosexuality in Japan in non-
Buddhist kami tradition (anal sex)

4. The Church's "Crusade" against Gay Marriage

http://catholicarrogance.org/Catholic/Churchvsgays.html
 Heteronormativity - Homonormativity vis-à-vis
Queer Theology (Religion & Gender Roles)

Heteronormativity - coined by Michael Warner in 1991 in one of the

1st major works of QUEER THEORY describing the marginalization of
people who are non-heterosexual and the assumption that heterosexuality
is the normal sexual orientation - and states that sexual and marital
relations are most (or only) fitting between a man and a woman.

Idea: people fall into two distinct and complementary categories: male
and female; and that each sex has certain natural roles in life. Thus
physical sex, gender identity, and gender roles should, in any given person,
align to either all-male or all-female cultural norms.
 Heteronormativity - Homonormativity vis-à-vis
Queer Theology (Religion & Gender Roles)

Homonormativity creates an assimilation of sexual citizenship; it

develops a label for a marginalized group of peoples that have a
commonality: a difference from heterosexual orientation. Lisa Duggan
identified this trend as evidence of “the new homonormativity…a politics
that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and
institutions but upholds and sustains them.”

It is believed that homosexuals are surrendering and conforming to

heteronormative behavior. Major examples of this is the support and
determination of gay marriage and gay adoption. The new acceptance of
homosexuals, homosexuals have accepted homonormativity, a politic that
is actually upholding and sustaining heteronormative norms and
phenomenons.
 Heteronormativity - Homonormativity vis-à-vis
Queer Theology (Religion & Gender Roles)

Queer Theory’s main project is exploring the contesting of the

categorization of gender and sexuality; identities are not fixed, not
categorized and labeled. The theory's goal is to destabilize identity
categories, which are designed to identify the “sexed subject” and
place individuals within a single restrictive sexual orientation.

Queer theology refers to the application of queer studies to theology.

In queer theology these concerns are linked to the nature of the divine
and humankind's relationship with God. While some Queer Theologians
devote some time and energy to work that seeks to refute the more
conservative teaching that homosexual desires are disordered and
homosexual acts are sinful, increasingly the focus is moving away from
the justification of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender desires &
behavior and more towards the exploration of wider theological issues
arising from these communities.
 Heteronormativity - Homonormativity vis-à-vis
Queer Theology (Religion & Gender Roles)

Themes discussed by scholars of religion are queer challenges to:

Christian theology, LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) and queer
readings of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and explorations of the
intersections of sexual and religious identities.

“But the term [queer] – and its deployment – is less well known in
theology, and so it is still possible that this positionality, this
distancing or divergence from what is held as normative, will serve
to destabilize and undo that normativity: the surety of
heteropatriarchal Christianity. But in the case of theology there is
something more.”
(G. Loughlin (ed.), Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, Malden: Blackwell
2007, 9-10: to make the same different, the familiar strange, the odd
wonderful; and to do so not out of perversity, but in faithfulness to the
different, strange, and wonderful by which we are encountered in the story
of Jesus and the body of Christ)
One goal of the on-going development of such a queer theology is to uncover
the queerness that was always already in Christianity, perhaps even at its very
core.

QUEER THEOLOGIANS:

1. David Matzko McCarthy: re-reads the queer desires of saints.

2. Tina Beattie: examines the particular heterosexualization and

domestication of Mary within Christian history. She suggests how a critical
rereading can uncover the queerness, or non-heteronormativity, of a
Christian attempt to seek immortality not through raising offspring but
through eternity in Christ.

3. Melissa Wilcox: Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are not a religious

organization, they offer a rich site to rethink existing categories of
‘religious’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘secular’. The white-faced Sisters combine
Catholic imagery with drag and leather culture and offer a complex site
for queer religious negotiations.
Queer Ethnic & Diaspora:
e.g. Filipino migrant workers in Israel:
1. performers in a weekly drag show, called Paper Dolls, for the Filipino
queer community in Tel Aviv
2. most work as health caretakers for elderly Orthodox Jewish Israelis -
ineligible for citizenship and work visas are tied to their employment

There are rich layers of signification that relate to gender and religion, such
as the question of how Jewish and Catholic practices of kinship intersect
with narratives of national belonging that support and/or undo specific
gendered roles.
D. Why norms on sex as created and regulated by religion are
difficult to observe: the Compatibility Question
Religion & Sex may be seen as ultimate in the sense that they
stand at the apex of other value hierarchies... Ironically, sexual
and religious motives seem constantly in conflict.

CELIBACY is a freely chosen dynamic state, usually vowed, that involves an honest
and sustained attempt to live without direct sexual gratification in order to serve
others productively for a spiritual motive.

CHASTITY Brahmacharya is absolute freedom from sexual thoughts and desires.

It is the vow of celibacy. It is control of all the senses in thought, word and deed.

ABSTINENCE & VIRGINITY in Abrahamic religious tradition are simplified as

forms of sexual savings accounts, or erotic asceticism.
Sex is ‘transactional’ when it bridges the boundaries between institutions and the
occult sociality of sexuality. This happens when the sexual values that are created ‘in
private’, during ‘intimacy’—that is as occult sociality—become public and are
transacted for public goods as ‘economic’ exchanges.
 CHURCH & GENDER ROLES
The movements espousing women's right and female equality cast aspersions on
the patriarchal structure of the church, leading to questions about the ordination
of women and questions about the celibacy requirement as having its roots in
hostility toward women.

Feminism and Islam

Siham Ouazzif, MA Anthropology.
Veiled Muslim Women in Australian Public Space: How do Veiled Women Express their
Presence and Interact in the Workplace?

Muslim women, activists, writers and poets like women everywhere have advocated
in different ways for women’s rights before the colonial West made it its duty to free
them from patriarchal culture and above all from Islam.

Meriam Cooke in her book, “Women Claim Islam”, argues that feminism embodies
more than a culturally specific term (Cooke 2001; 3). “Feminism is much more than
an ideology driving organized political movement, it is an epistemology” (Cooke;
preface). Feminism is about depicting injustice in the name of gender, a universal
feminism that rejects any kind of patriarchal subjugation. Within the feminist
debate regarding Muslim women it is the position and status of the woman that has
been the main focus.
 CHURCH & GENDER ROLES

Misogyny and Female Perspective

In 1990, German theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann wrote her volatile book
Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven (subtitled, "Women, Sexuality, and the
Catholic Church.") The book jacket introduces the book as, "...the definitive
study on the oppression of women in Western Society…from the Apostle
Paul to Pope John Paul II, the Church has designated sex, degraded women
and championed a perverse ideal of celibacy."

Dr. Ranke-Heinemann contends that the historical Church view of sex as being
unclear and the imposition of celibacy on the Catholic clergy virtually assured
the need for the mistrust and hatred of women and the temptation they
posed to men of God attempting to maintain their vows.

Thomas G. Lederer, M.A.. CELIBACY IS THE ISSUE. November 1992

www.arthurstreet.com/celibacy1993.html
 GOOD: Acceptable - Moral -
Pure
1. Sex is permissible only within the
context of a marriage - at the proper
time and in the proper context
(Judaism - Kosher sex)
EVIL: Non-acceptable - Immoral - Impure
1a. Incestuous relationships:
(Levi-Strauss claims that one of the reasons that incest is
prohibited is because it only reproduces defected human
beings, which in the long term would lead to the extinction of
human kind.)
1b. Homosexual acts are condemned not homosexual
orientations (entailing desires only rather than actions)

2. Monogamous / polygamous relationships (Tibetan Buddhist culture )

3. 'cleanliness is not distinct from
godliness' (Japanese Buddhist
culture)
3. Non-consensual or exploitative sex as forms of
“misconduct” - Indulging in sexual misconduct
e.g. monks and nuns who engage in sexual intercourse are
“defeated” and are expelled automatically from the order; sex
erupts from animal passion, physical pleasure, with the desire
to possess, dominate

4. No sexual activity of any kind 4. Chastity for mature males having sex with the following
(Puritan Buddhism) kinds of women: minors, close relatives, girls under the
celibacy / abstinence protection of their parents, betrothed girls, women married to
other men, adulterous women, female convicts and nuns
5. Sexual and marital relations are 5a. Not fitting in a specific system: homosexuals don’t fit in
most (or only) fitting between a man circle of life, they cannot reproduce (Sunni) (the world would
and a woman (Heteronormativity) go under);
5b.In Christianity sodomy is considered as “a sin against
nature”.
5c. The sexual act of sodomy is seen as animalistic. Anal Sex
(doggy-style)
 Religion in Sex/uality & Gender Roles:
Compatibility Questioned

Sex (sexuality/gender) and religion are compatible –

only for those who practice the regulations
provisioned by each one’s respective religion in
observance of recognizing the parameters entailed
within the accepted norms of morality issues, in the
cultural context of good & evil.
 
Incompatibility arises when regulated provisions of
religion are violated or questioned.