Search results for ""author janet r. jakobsen""

Finalist, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Offers a way to undo the inextricable American knot of sex, politics, religion, and power American politics are obsessed with sex. Before the first televised presidential debate, John F. Kennedy trailed Richard Nixon in the polls. As Americans tuned in, however, they found Kennedy a younger, more vivacious, and more attractive choice than Nixon. Sexier. The political significance of Kennedy’s telegenic sex appeal is now widely accepted – but taking sexual politics seriously is not. Janet R. Jakobsen examines how, for the last several decades, gender and sexuality have reappeared time and again at the center of political life, marked by a series of widely recognized issues and movements – women’s liberation and gay liberation in the 1960s and ’70s, the AIDS crisis and ACT UP in the ‘80s and ’90s, welfare and immigration “reform” in the ‘90s, wars claiming to “save women” in the 2000s, and battles over health care in the 2010s, to recent demands for reproductive justice, trans liberation, and the explosive exposures of #MeToo. Religion has been wound up in these political struggles, and blamed for not a little of the resistance to meaningful change in America political life. Jakobsen acknowledges that religion is a force to be reckoned with, but decisively breaks with the common sense that religion and sex are the fixed binary of American political life. She instead follows the kaleidoscopic ways in which sexual politics are embedded in social relations of all kinds – not only the intimate relations of love and family with which gender and sex are routinely associated, but also secularism, freedom, race, disability, capitalism, nation and state, housing and the environment. In the midst of these obsessions, Jakobsen’s promiscuous ethical imagination guides us forward. Drawing on examples from collaborative projects among activists, academics and artists, Jakobsen shows that sexual politics can contribute to building justice from the ground up. Gender and sexual relations are practices through which values emerge and communities are made. Sex and desire, gender and embodiment emerge as bases of ethical possibility, breaking political stalemate and opening new possibility.

Read more less

At a time when secularism is put forward as the answer to religious fundamentalism and violence, Secularisms offers a powerful, multivoiced critique of the narrative equating secularism with modernity, reason, freedom, peace, and progress. Bringing together essays by scholars based in religious studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, science studies, anthropology, and political science, this volume challenges the binary conception of “conservative” religion versus “progressive” secularism. With essays addressing secularism in India, Iran, Turkey, Great Britain, China, and the United States, this collection crucially complicates the dominant narrative by showing that secularism is multifaceted. How secularism is lived and experienced varies with its national, regional, and religious context. The essays explore local secularisms in relation to religious traditions ranging from Islam to Judaism, Hinduism to Christianity. Several contributors explicitly take up the way feminism has been implicated in the dominant secularization story. Ultimately, by dislodging secularism’s connection to the single (and singular) progress narrative, this volume seeks to open spaces for other possible narratives about both secularism and religion—as well as for other possible ways of inhabiting the contemporary world.Contributors: Robert J. Baird, Andrew Davison, Tracy Fessenden, Janet R. Jakobsen, Laura Levitt,Molly McGarry, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Taha Parla, Geeta Patel, Ann Pellegrini, Tyler Roberts,Ranu Samantrai, Banu Subramaniam, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Angela Zito

Read more less