Sacralizing Sexualized Bodies

This essay invites readers to consider that full inclusion in religious spaces – including in religious education – may demand the sacralization of sexualized bodies. Noting that minoritization and sexualization often go hand in hand, such that the bodies of women, queer and trans people, and religious and ethnic minorities, among others, are perceived in the societies around them as sexually aberrant, I suggest that these bodies are most often incorporated in religious spaces – when they are incorporated at all – through desexualization. This approach, while widely used, requires minoritized people to leave their flesh behind in order to enter sacred space, effectively forcing them to choose in ways that others need not between embodiment and access to the sacred. I suggest that another, more inclusive and also more pedagogically sound option is to sacralize these sexualized bodies in the same way that majoritarian bodies are already sacralized

Aesthetics · Art · Ethnic group · Human sexuality · Inclusion (mineral) · Queer · Sexualization · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions

• Passionate and Pious

  Monique Moultrie•Passionate and Pious•2017

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