Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This article explores the connection between religious and sexual sources of personal meaning. It revisits the analyses of modern sexuality offered by Michel Foucault and Catharine MacKinnon to argue that an understanding of the role of sexuality in religious confessional discourse sheds new light on the role of pornography in contemporary culture. Pornography can be understood as a popular discourse with effects analogous to the elite discourse, rooted in confession, examined by Foucault. This analysis reveals ways that Foucault’s attention to religious texts might shed more direct light on lived sexualities, and the relationship between sexuality, spirituality and notions of the sacred in contemporary culture.

Keywords

Foucault MacKinnon pornography religion sexuality

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adorno T. ( 1978) Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. New York: Verso.

Anderson B. ( 1991) Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.

Bersani L. ( 1988) Is the rectum a grave? In: Crimp D (ed.) AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 197-222.

Bourdieu P. ( 1996) Masculine domination revisited. Goffman Prize Lecture, Berkeley California, 4 April.

Brown W. ( 1995) States of Injury. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Butler J. ( 1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.

Connolly WE ( 2008) Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Durkheim E. ( 2001) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. (trans. C Cosman) . New York: Oxford University Press .

Foucault M. ( 1990) The History of Sexuality, Volume I. New York: Vintage.

10.

Freud S. ( 1989) Three contributions to the theory of sex. In: Gay P (ed.) The Freud Reader. New York: WW Norton and Company, 239-292.

11.

James W. ( 1961) The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Collier Books.

12.

Kahn P. ( 2005a) Putting Liberalism in its Place. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

13.

Kahn P. ( 2005b) Beyond reason and desire: Political thought and the problem of sex, American Sexuality Magazine 3(4). URL (accessed July 2008): http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/american_sexuality.

14.

Kintz L. ( 1997) Between Jesus and the Market. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

15.

MacKinnon C. ( 1987) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

16.

MacKinnon C. ( 1989) Towards a Feminist Theory of the State. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

17.

MacKinnon C. ( 2000) Points against postmodernism. Chicago Kent Law Review 75: 687-698.

18.

Nealon C. ( 2001) Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

19.

Nietzsche F. ( 1967) On the Genealogy of Morals. New York : Random House.

20.

Paul P. ( 2005) Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. New York: Macmillan Press.

21.

Rich F. ( 2001) Naked capitalists. New York Times Magazine , 20 May: 51-52.

22.

Soble A. ( 1986) Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

23.

Stark R. ( 2005) The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House.

24.

West C. ( 1993) Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B Eerdmans Publishing.

25.

Wolfe A. ( 2009) The Future of Liberalism. New York : Random House.

Confession,sexuality and pornography as sacred language

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References