Religion and Sexualities

Sarah-Jane Page is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University, UK, and the co-author of Religious and Sexual Identities: A Multi-faith Exploration of Young Adults and Understanding Young Buddhists: Living Out Ethical Journeys. Heather Shipley is Project Manager for the Nonreligion in a Complex Future Project at the University of Ottawa, Canada. She is co-author, with Pamela Dickey Young (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada) of Identities Under Construction: Religion, Gender and Sexuality among Youth in Canada and editor of Globalized Religion and Sexual Identity: Contexts, Contestations, Voices.

"This is an excellent interdisciplinary book, capturing the complex, changing and multidimensional relationship between religion and sexuality. Page and Shipley are key international scholars in the field and intertwine their multi-sited research, over a 15year period, illustrating religious-sexual citizenship, embodiment, practice, identity – and more – beyond enduring problematic binary thinking. An impressive range of methodological and theoretical approaches are used, framed in conversation with queer feminist perspectives, and returning the reader to intersectional endeavours and potentials. This book constitutes an extensive and impressive overview of ‘where we are now’, pushing important questions of ‘what next?’ for sexuality and religion studies."- Yvette Taylor, University of Strathclyde, UK. "This timely text provides a meticulous, in-depth and critical interrogation of a wide range of theories and methodologies on religion and sexuality, substantially enriched by empirical insights drawn from the authors’ own research projects. Offering a thorough mapping of the current terrain and authoritative directions for future research, this expansive and exhaustive text is a must-read for scholars investigating religion and sexuality." - Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip, University of Nottingham, UK"Building from their own research projects, Page and Shipley offer an innovative and inclusive approach to the study of religion and sexualities, where both central topics are seen as complex, lived, and multi-layered. Using a queer feminist lens, the book explores various regulatory relationships between sexualities and religion, moving beyond the ‘straight time’ conceptions of the supposedly typical life pattern to an examination of how religion and sexualities intersect in multiple and often unpredictable ways, making this a substantial and valuable contribution to the expanding field of studies in religion and sexuality." - Pamela Dickey Young, Queen’s University, Canada

• Introduction 1. Situating Sexualities and Religion: Place, Space and the Body 2. Understanding Sexualities and Religion through Censure and Control 3. Identity, Sexualities and Religion 4. Methodological Insights: Researching Religion and Sexualities 5. Conceptualising the ‘Normative’: The Straight Time Model 6. Navigating the ‘Normative’: Constituting Safe and Unsafe Space 7. Gendering Sexuality and Religion 8. Gendered Bodies: Reproductive and Sexual Control 9. Institutional Contexts: Religion and State Processes Conclusion: Managing Religion and Sexualities