INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS: Religion and state processes

Introduction

Institutional settings are collective spaces where individuals participate in routinised and predictable practices (Goffman, 1961). As Lune argues, ‘An institution is defined by the unwritten rules that everyone understands about some kind of organized behavior’ (2010, p. 2). Here we are concerned with a queer feminist analysis of the power of religious institutions. An institutional organisation is one where roles and rules are embedded, often based on tradition and “commonsense” ways of doing things. In this chapter, we are therefore interested in institutional processes and practices, written and unwritten, which have contributed to the regulation and management of sexuality issues. In a number of examples cited, religious and state institutions have cooperated and been bolstered through mutual dependence.

Two theorists can help us examine what effects institutions can have in relation to religion and sexuality and can be fruitfully utilised to explore forms of regulation, power, and control through a queer feminist lens. Goffman (1961), in his fieldwork on prisons and psychiatric hospitals, coined the term “total institution”, meaning the way in which an organisational culture can envelop an individual. Goffman describes a total institution as a place where ‘a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life’ (1961, p. 11). As Clegg argues, ‘Institutions are total when they surround the person at every turn: They cannot be escaped, they produce and reproduce the normalcy of life inside the institution - however abnormal it might seem from outside’ (2006, p. 427). Often individuals belonging to a total institution are separated off from the outside world, with the organisation as their only reference point, and where the norms of the organisation become routinised. Surveillance becomes typical. Goffman recognised that certain religious organisations such as monasteries could be considered total institutions — but their features can be reproduced in less intense contexts. What makes the total institution distinctive is that it separates itself off from other spaces. The features of total institutions are replicated in institutions that are more permeable and loose. McPhillips (2018), for example, notes how victims of abuse in the Roman Catholic Church experience it as a total institution, as the Roman Catholic Church was the reference point for every element of life - school, home, and church. Despite not physically being cloistered behind the walls of a monastery, the power of the Church seeped through all elements of a child’s life, in an encompassing and totalising experience.

Foucault examines how institutions produce disciplined subjects, with the body situated at the centre of regulatory regimes. Discipline has changed historically from physical forms of torture and pain, to systems where disciplinary expectations are internalised, so that compliance comes from within. Using Bentham’s idea of the panopticon - the prison with a watchtower where the prisoner is always on show but never knows when he/she is being watched -indicates a form of internalised discipline; one self-regulates oneself. While the most extreme example of the panopticon is the prison, this correlates to other institutional systems, especially in the context of the nation state and who is considered to legitimately belong. Citizenship status is fragile, with sexuality being a particular panoptical concern of nation states. Foucault’s (1976) notion of biopower connects the health of the modern nation state and the health of the population; much time is invested in knowing the population, through measuring life expectancy, birth and death rates, and disease. As the state started to take over functions previously undertaken by religious institutions concerning individual regulation and discipline, striving for salvation is replaced with cultivating good health and longevity, in the process creating new kinds of discipline (Bevir, 1999). Importantly, whether subscribing to the needs of a religious tradition or the state, these normatives are internally accepted, enabling institutional control of individuals through various discourses, cementing the power-knowledge nexus. Compliance is cultivated by doing what is perceived to be in one’s best interests - the health check may encompass elements of discomfort, but if it stops disease from spreading, one will comply. The punishment, in this case, is suffering from a nasty disease. Confessing one’s sins to the priest may engender forms of embarrassment, but by undergoing this process it ensures one’s eternal soul. In this case, there is an explicit reward being invoked. As the state takes over functions previously assigned to religious institutions, it tightens its control. Yet this takes diffuse and varied forms; the organisational arms of the state are multiple and varied and these may well contradict each other. Similarly, this chapter will consider complex religious institutions where the power base is not as coherent and centralised as it first appears. This chapter will consider examples where the power regimes of religion and state become enmeshed and entangled, with implications for understanding religion and sexuality.

In sum, this chapter is focused on institutional responses to sexuality issues, therefore focusing on the context within which religious adherents live out their sexuality within particular institutional boundaries. It starts by analysing the relationship between the state and religion, recognising the complex relationships that religious institutions have with the state and its subsidiary functions such as education. This is bound up with who gets recognised as a citizen and the extent to which religions are utilised in broader functions of the state. This section will consider case studies detailing the outcomes of state-religious collaboration, such as the Magdalene laundries. The next section will focus specifically on religious discourses on sexuality, emphasising some of the statements religious institutions have issued on sexuality issues to emphasise the power that operates through institutional statements that are given certain levels of authority. The final section, institutional abuse, will focus on the ways in which institutional cultures have enabled sexual abuses of power to occur. Institutionally, religious organisations were by no means alone, with many secular organisations implicated too. But those involving religious institutions highlight particular issues worthy of attention, especially when notions of the sacred are invoked, whereby religious institutions are set on higher pedestals than most (Lynch, forthcoming).