284 Mary Jo Neitz
Religion and the Body
Movement toward thinking about religious practices instead of religious organizations,
and religion outside the institutions instead of within formal religious organizations,
has led to a new body of research that looks at religious practices in relation to possibili-
ties and constraints linked to embodiment as female bodies. Looking at lived experience
allows us into the presence of women, but what we see is full of cultural contradictions.
Of particular note is the new work that begins to look at the social/cultural regulation
of reproduction, sexuality, and violence and abuse of women. This is relatively new
terrain because sociologists are only beginning to think about embodiment. Klassen’s
study of home birth (2001) brings together an understanding of lived religion and em-
bodied religion, disrupting conventional views of both religion and childbirth. Susan
Sered (2000) inWhat Makes Women Sick?addresses what she calls the cultural politics
of somaticization. Through a series of specific investigations – of abortion, childbirth,
infertility, breastfeeding, rape in military contexts, ritual purity, and body image – we
see religion as a site for resistance as well as a site for oppression for women in Israel.
But, Sered argues, the forms of resistance religion offers largely use women in iconic
ways rather than offering women agency. In addition, Sered shows the intersection of
different institutional sources of oppression. Time and time again in this book, Sered
demonstrates connections between culture, religion, and politics. Marion Goldman ex-
tends these questions to the male experience, looking at the connections between the
culture of elite Protestants in the 1950s, and body and spirituality at Esalen Institute.
Goldman argues that while Esalen has consistently emphasized body-mind connec-
tions, these have a gendered aspect: Women focused on healing aspects of body work,
but for many elite Protestant men, Esalen made available the idea of sport as a “struc-
tured, embodied spirituality” (2000: 9). The religious practices developed at Esalen could
be perceived as manly, by virtue of the link with sports.
Nason Clark (1997, 2000) has been a leader in both investigating church people’s
response to abused women, and in counseling pastors to take a leadership role in at-
tending to issues of sexual violence among members of their congregations.^8 Studies
of sexual abuse survivors, with samples of inner-city minority women and of Mormon
women, suggest that spirituality can be a resource for counseling women for whom
religion is a cultural resource (Kennedy, Davis, and Taylor 1998; Pritt 1998). Another
approach is to investigate religious organizations’ complicity in matters of sexual abuse.
Essays in a collection edited by Shupe, Stacey, and Darnell (2000) examine sexual abuses
by religious leaders, as well as ways that organizational structures can inhibit such be-
haviors, or conversely, protect and hide the perpetrators. Others have studied how
religious belief systems are internalized and then used by victims of wife abuse and
sexual abuse (Lundgren 1998; Jacobs 1995).
God is a Woman
Feminist goddess religions imagine female deities. This disruption of tradition raises
issues of religion and the body in a quite different way. A number of writers have
shown how women practitioners of contemporary witchcraft find goddess imagery a
(^8) To be discussed in more detail later.