Gendering sexuality and religion

Introduction

To understand the gendering of sexuality within religious contexts, one must start with the body. Embodiment connects together religion, sexuality, and gender, and underpins our queer feminist approach. Women’s bodies - in historical and contemporary discourse - have been considered inferior in various ways. While how gender is constituted has varied over time and space, dominant Western understandings, separating gender into two distinct categories, have had much impact on how sexuality is perceived, helping to make heterosexuality normative. Where gender is conceptualised in terms of male and female, there is an accompanying tendency to see these genders as distinct, with differing characteristics.

Heteronormativity is based on the assumption that “female” and “male” constitute the standard form of sexual attraction. From this, assumptions have been made that women’s proper sexual role is in terms of the private sphere - childbearing and childrearing. Religious discourses have done much to support and embed these constructions. This chapter will start by giving a brief overview of the ways in which dominant constructions of gender have historically emerged, with a specific focus on the importance given to separate spheres and gender differentiation from the Enlightenment onwards, and the role that religion played in this construction. The chapter will then move on to look at specific examples of this demarcation, and how notions of sexual difference and gendered norma-tives were consolidated through the prizing of women’s virginity and modesty. At the same time, in order for male bodies to retain their normative and authoritative status, women’s bodies were further demarcated in terms of impurity. The chapter will end by arguing that an embodied understanding of gender, sexuality, and religion is needed to fully understand their relationship.

Separate spheres, Christianity, and a colonial inheritance

Societies read bodies through a gendered lens, and typically, religious discourses play a role in sustaining particular understandings of the gendered body. In the Western world, much emphasis has been placed on a binary gendered logic, where the individual is firmly defined as either male or female. This boundary between male and female has historically been policed by various institutions such as medicine (operating on bodies that do not “fit” the normative gendered schema), schools (defining academic subjects as either “for boys” or “for girls”), and the workplace (defining certain jobs as being “for men” or “for women”). Such categorisations have been accompanied by stereotypes and assumptions about what gendered bodies do and what sort of body is “best” for certain tasks and activities. Historically, middle-class women were seen as too fragile to participate in certain jobs; they were seen as unsuited to academic tasks as these were seen as a threat to their fertility (Robinson, 2009). And they were deemed too weak to undertake manual labour, despite working-class and Black women’s long-standing participation in back-breaking work (McClintock, 1995). This was facilitated through separate spheres ideology, a product of the Enlightenment, where women became associated with private sphere activity and men became associated with the public sphere.

Pateman (1988) offers a powerful account of the development of separate spheres ideology and the intertwining ways in which political and religious systems intersected to ensure women were structurally under the authority of men in Western societies. Up to the 17th century, power was firmly located in the father as head of the family, buttressed through scripture and sermons from the pulpit. The pervasive logic was that the patriarchal family formed the origins of society and civilisation itself. Fathers ruled sons as well as mothers and daughters. Yet in the 17th century, this mode of thinking was displaced by another political construction, where each individual is considered autonomous and free to make social contracts with other autonomous individuals. The rule of the father was therefore dislodged, theoretically allowing women to be perceived as autonomous persons. However, women were ultimately excluded from this contract-making personhood. The view of the social contract theorists was that only men can enter into contracts with each other. In this sense, patriarchy becomes fraternal instead of paternal. Pateman calls it the difference between the social contract and the sexual contract. It was at this moment that the separation of public (cultural; male) and private (natural; female) spheres cemented sexual difference. Women were denied access to the public sphere, whereas men were freely allowed to move between the public and the private sphere, and rights to make contracts in the public sphere. The only contract women were legitimately allowed to participate in was the marriage contract, which cemented a husband’s rights over his wife in terms of sexual access and property rights. On this separation of social life into the public and private spheres, women were firmly located in the private sphere.

Women’s supreme vocation was therefore situated in the domestic sphere, as wives and mothers, and not as paid workers. This construction of separate sphere was not only gendered; it was also classed and raced. Indeed, separate spheres ideology was crystallised through Western colonial expansion projects, especially the British, perpetuating inequalities where racism, classism, and sexism intersected. Colonial expansion was constructed as an inalienable good, a means of promoting these “civilised” political and social values to other territories and lands deemed “uncivilised” and in need of cultivation. As McClintock (1995) argues, women’s placement in the private sphere, their role principally understood through childbearing, underpinned ideas about colonialism and imperialism, for it was men who were to conquer this “virgin territory”; indeed, the colonised lands themselves were gendered and seen as ripe for white men to explore and exploit. White middle-class women’s bodies came to denote the domesticity and civility craved for by the colonists; these women were responsible for reproducing the white nation, and their bodies were therefore heavily controlled, accompanied by a Victorian preoccupation with sexual purity. White middle-class women were to remain bounded to the private sphere and were not to cross sexual borders, lest it be “contaminating”. Whereas white middle-class women became the focus of passive reproductive sexuality, Black women’s bodies became associated with active pleasurable sexuality, their bodies understood in excessively sexualised ways (Jantzen, 2005). Racial hierarchies were devised by the Victorians, where bodies were mapped - skulls were measured, and clitorises examined. These borders - between public and private, “civilised” and “uncivilised” -were heavily policed. Because both Black women and working-class women did not epitomise idealised domestic femininity and were not representatives of sexual purity, they were considered suitable for back-breaking work. These contradictory understandings of femininity were highlighted through the example of the Wigan pit women who worked at the coalface in the Lancashire coal mines:

The Wigan women epitomized the contradictions in Victorian attitudes to women’s work and threw into stark relief the conflict between the image of the idle, ornamental woman and the actuality of female manual labor. Yet much of the outrage vented at the spectacle of trousered women wielding picks and shovels was hypocritical, for their work was often less gruelling and less injurious than other occupations. A young maid-of-all-work, for example, could work longer and more exhausting hours carrying buckets of water or scuttles of coal up many flights of stairs, emptying stinking slop pails, scrubbing, cleaning and polishing - all the while isolated from family or community, pitifully paid; and frequently emotionally and physically at the mercy of the men of the household. But domestic work, if often more difficult and more debilitating, was domestic work, hidden in kitchen and scullery — a less visible affront to the emerging ideology of female idleness.

And since it was not a field of competition with men, there were no outcries on these women’s behalf.

(McClintock, 1995, p. 114)

Religious discourses had an important part to play in upholding separate spheres and its raced, classed, and gendered dimensions. The domesticated, privatised white middle-class femininity that was cultivated was predicated on Christian piety - indeed femininity became entwined with piety. In the British context, such ideas were exported through colonial expansion, and the racial hierarchies that developed in colonies such as Australia and Canada. As Brown (2001) argues, between 1800 and 1950 in Britain, Christian piety, premised on the popularity of Evangelicalism, enjoyed unrivalled success and this piety was constructed as feminine in nature - women were considered to be equal to men at a spiritual level. But this came with the expectation to raise respectable, morally upstanding Christian citizens. White, middle-class women were understood as epitomising the Christian virtues of sobriety and sexual morality, cemented in the Victorian ideal of the “Angel of the House”. This, however, was privatised authority, for ‘Women had become divine, but an angel now confined to the house’ (Brown, 2001, p. 58). Women failing in their duty (e.g. by raising “morally suspect” citizens) were vilified. But this status as the guardians of Christian morality enabled middle-class women to carve out certain roles that were deemed commensurate with their feminine piety. For example, their engagement with charitable and volunteer work was deemed a suitable pastime. But this had the consequence of middle-class women enacting forms of surveillance towards working-class lives, in relation to children’s education, sobriety campaigns, and prostitution (Brown, 2001; Gill, 1994; Weeks, 2014). This also extended to a role in missionary work in colonised countries, for ‘Wives and mothers were regarded as potent vectors of culture and belief’ (Semple, 2010, p. 118), thereby cementing the classed and raced hierarchies of respectable femininity. Christianity itself was understood as a civilising project in “uncivilised” countries. Indeed, it was Western definitions of welfare which determined the activities and focus of the women missionaries, thereby emphasising the power white, middle-class women could garner over and above not only working-class women in their own countries but also women living under colonial rule.

Religions can be powerfully effective in supporting the status quo, especially due to the way the notion of tradition can be invoked, cementing a particular way of doing things. In addition, traditions, as rooted in sacred-bearing texts and practices, are often given special status by followers. Feminists have been rightly suspicious of religions for upholding traditional ways of thinking and hindering or even blocking women’s agency. Many religious traditions have readily endorsed separate spheres ideology, in the process curtailing the public roles women have in public life, for example, as religious leaders. Instead, women’s piety has been constructed in terms of domesticity and childrearing; women’s respectability and middle-class femininity were seen as threatened were they to step outside of these clear roles and become preachers, for example - especially as this was disruptive of their assumed non-relationship to the public sphere (Peart, 2008). Religious traditions have also had a role to play in the bodily control of women. As Turner (2011, p. 22-3) argues, ‘Patriarchy has specific and important connections with religion as a principle of reproductive legitimacy. The rites and rituals that surround birth and rebirth are fundamental to all religions, and the notion of regeneration has been crucial to ancient cosmologies’. Because paternity cannot be assured, systems have historically been implemented to assure men that the child they are raising - and the sons that will inherit their wealth -are biologically theirs (O’Brien, 1981). While not inevitable, control of women is one way of achieving this. For O’Brien, the separation of the public and private is a result of the need to separate women from other men, in order to secure paternity for the man she is married to. A whole buttress of laws and ideologies -including religious ones - are created in order to support this system.

It is also the case that religion has historically given women access to certain opportunities to contest their social situation and to carve out different forms of femininity. For example, while through contemporary eyes, the Enlightenment construction of women as pious and godly may be deemed limiting, it could engender the right for some women to challenge the status quo. Apetrei (2010) documents how early Enlightenment women could productively utilise their associations with Christian piety to develop roles for themselves in religious leadership. Instead of the Bible being a text supporting existing understandings of gender, scripture was utilised to articulate women’s equal status, for example, refusing to obey one’s husband during the marriage vows, for there was no biblical basis for it. By the 19th century, religion continued to frame the discussion regarding women’s emancipation, with the Bible forming the critical backdrop to discussions over gender equality (Schwartz, 2010a).

The relationship between the gendered body and religion is highly complex, fluid, and variable. First-wave feminists, influenced by Evangelical Christianity, were keen to portray a respectable femininity and were dissuaded from campaigning on sexuality issues (Schwartz, 2010b; Weeks, 2014). They located the problems women experienced in the excessive sexualities of men, and the illogic of the sexual double standard, which punished women for sexual misdemeanours rather than men. The response to this, however, as Weeks (2014) highlights, is as equally likely to be a conservative one (e.g. promoting chastity and sexual restraint for all sexes) as much as what today would be considered emancipatory. In this sense, conservative elements of a religious tradition (in this case, Christianity) could be utilised with the intention of enabling greater agency for women.

In summary, the heuristic device of separating the public sphere associated with culture and the private sphere associated with nature was gendered. Women were firmly located within the private sphere, meaning that their attempts to access public sphere tasks - e.g. to be educated or to be in paid work - was a challenging one. We have focused here on Christianity specifically because of the enormous influence Christianity had through colonialist forms of empirebuilding, where control of countries across the globe was seized by a handful of Western nations. Because separate spheres ideology was fundamental to the logic of the colonialists, this ideology therefore had a significant part to play in imperialist expansion across the world, with ideas about gender being relocated to colonised spaces. Christianity, as the religion of the colonists, shaped these gendered understandings, with Christianity constructed as a means of promoting “civilised” morals and values, and Christianity itself being upheld as superior to any other religious traditions encountered. It was on the back of this sense of Christian superiority that some women - namely, white middle-class women -were able to achieve forms of authority, but this was predicated on a sense that their Christian piety surpassed that of other women.