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Sian Melvill Hawthorne
Sîan Hawthorne is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Religion in the School of History, Religions, and Philosophies, SOAS, University of London. Her research interests lie in the areas of intellectual history, religion and politics, narrativity, feminist and postcolonial criticism, and epistemological modelling and theory and method in the study of religions. She is subject head for Religions and Philosophies in the School of History, Religions, and Philosophies, the convenor of SOAS' MA Religions in Global Politics, and the convenor of the BA World Philosophies, a unique degree that focuses on training students in philosophical traditions beyond (but in dialogue with) European and Anglophone philosophy.
Supervisors: Tina Beattie and Julia Leslie
Phone: 0207 898 4215
Address: School of History, Religions, and Philosophies
SOAS, University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
United Kingdom
Supervisors: Tina Beattie and Julia Leslie
Phone: 0207 898 4215
Address: School of History, Religions, and Philosophies
SOAS, University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
United Kingdom
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Grillo’s An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics
in Côte d’Ivoire and argue instead for its inclusion as a resource for
immanent critique. I argue that Grillo’s text enhances and enriches
the way we may think about time and politics in the postcolonial
moment, but that it may in turn also be revitalised and strengthened
by speaking with and to postcolonial thought, adding it to the lexicon
and strategies of displacement Grillo identifies in practices of female
genital power and the matri-archive they reference.
The incorporation of LGBTIQ subjects into heteronormative domestic institutions in liberal states via various forms of enfranchisement is what Lisa Duggan terms the ‘‘new homonormative’’ (2002) and what David L. Eng calls ‘‘queer liberalism’’ (2007). Both terms signal the inclusion of queer individuals in concepts of normative citizenship, which, while extending the benefits and rights of heteronormative identity and social practices to gay and lesbian citizens, also sets the regulatory terms (requiring conformity to heterosexual norms) in which they are able to acquire these rights. The term heteronormativity refers to the assumption that heterosexuality is the ‘‘normal’’ form of desire/sexual orientation, which permits marital relations and reproductive kinship only between people of opposite sexes. The relatively recent extension of rights to marriage, for example, to LGBTIQ couples is thus arguably predicated on the extent to which these citizens conform to or mirror the patterns and requirements of heteronormativity and its models of domestic sociality and sexual norms.
This chapter offers a consideration of the ways in which heteronormative ideologies are aligned with the nationalist secular liberal policies of the nation-state and examines the intersection of these ideologies and policies with race, religiosity, and sexuality. The first section of the chapter provides an overview of scholarly debates that address the centrality of gender in the formation of the nation-state historically. Gender underpins discourses of heterosexual national inclusion and exclusion and makes compliant and conservative heteronormative subjectivities the ground of citizenry. The next section extends the analysis to an assessment of the ways in which sexuality also provides a means of drawing up national boundaries where the nation-state is represented as intrinsically heteronormative. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, concepts of national identity have been extended to allow for the incorporation of homonormative models of citizenship. This section provides a detailed overview of the concept of homonationalism in the post-9/11 political context, setting out Puar’s (2007) theorization of the three phenomena that structure homonationalism: sexual exceptionalism, queerness as a regulatory norm, and white ascendancy. These three phenomena map the interweaving of race, gender, class, nation, and religion, enabling the self-representation of the United States as a civilized and civilizing force for good. This section also attends to the ways in which homonationalism functions both biopolitically (Foucault 2003, 2008) and necropolitically (Mbembe 2003)— that is, as determining which populations are worthy of life and protection (biopolitics) and which are seen as threatening and thus targets for elimination or subjection to colonial domination (necropolitics).
The subsequent section deals with the relationship between religion and the particular nationalist imaginary that claims ‘‘God is on our side,’’ a claim that supports discourses of nationalism, racism, and homophobia but also latterly homonationalism. The hostile attitude of mainstream US Christian discourse toward homosexuality and gender equality are highlighted. The following and concluding section then lays out the ways in which gay and lesbian theologies, seeking to counter Christian homophobia, nonetheless engage in the elevation of homonormativity and homonationalism. Finally, the chapter offers an overview of radical queer theologies, exemplified in the work of Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, which undo conceptions of God as being on the side of the imperialist nation-state.
With striking regularity, a number of ancient cosmogonies narrate male gods as progenitors, as sole creators of the world and initiators of temporal orders; that is, they set up the instruments—celestial bodies or seasonal arrangements, for example—by which the passing of time can be marked, and they establish this-worldly structures of governance and power. Three such cosmogonies are considered in this chapter: the Babylonian Enuma Elish ¯ , the Hebrew creation story in the book of Genesis, and the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s Theogony and the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Each myth portrays creation in terms of male parthenogenesis (asexual or monogenetic reproduction), using metaphors of birth-giving that appropriate or overturn female birth-giving capacities and setting up gods and thus origins and creation as paternal in nature. As this chapter shows, male procreation in these cosmogonies legitimizes social structures that emphasize the priority and primacy of male relationships (for example, father-son or fraternal bonds) and activities. In turn, the myths represent femaleness as passive, secondary to, dependent on, or vanquished by the male. Further, the characteristics of human maleness are implicitly connected to those of a divine male progenitor, linking God and man in a direct line of succession.
This chapter explores how such figurations of male creative power create temporal (that is, relating both to concepts of time and to this-worldly affairs), social, and gendered orders. The relationship between origin myths, gender structures, and the social outworking of patrilineal orders is examined in order to demonstrate the pivotal role that male creator gods play in legitimating and naturalizing male-dominated power formations. The first section outlines the methodological principles by which myths in general and origin myths in particular may be understood to legitimize certain social arrangements and power formations and override others. The next sections provide three examples of origin myths from the ancient Near East and Greece that narrate creation through male parthenogenesis and the subsequent social order underpinned by patrilineal authority. The subsequent section identifies how the gendered motifs and structures they promote and naturalize enable both restrictive gender valuations and top-down social organization, which in turn direct a wide range of social formations that operate on principles of inclusion and exclusion.
a more generalisable pattern of the forgetfulness of Christianity’s debts to other modalities, ontologies, and narratives in the quest to establish itself as pure, singular, monolingual, and monochrome. The Tree of Jesse serves as a particular and important example of the patrilineal
and fraternal affiliations and disaffiliations in the trajectory of the genealogy of the family tree, motivated by desires to support claims to pedigree and patrimony, reversed from a model of descent to one of ascent with the European “Aryans.”
Keywords: postcoloniality, religion and gender, catachresis, displacement, value-coding.
"
Grillo’s An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics
in Côte d’Ivoire and argue instead for its inclusion as a resource for
immanent critique. I argue that Grillo’s text enhances and enriches
the way we may think about time and politics in the postcolonial
moment, but that it may in turn also be revitalised and strengthened
by speaking with and to postcolonial thought, adding it to the lexicon
and strategies of displacement Grillo identifies in practices of female
genital power and the matri-archive they reference.
The incorporation of LGBTIQ subjects into heteronormative domestic institutions in liberal states via various forms of enfranchisement is what Lisa Duggan terms the ‘‘new homonormative’’ (2002) and what David L. Eng calls ‘‘queer liberalism’’ (2007). Both terms signal the inclusion of queer individuals in concepts of normative citizenship, which, while extending the benefits and rights of heteronormative identity and social practices to gay and lesbian citizens, also sets the regulatory terms (requiring conformity to heterosexual norms) in which they are able to acquire these rights. The term heteronormativity refers to the assumption that heterosexuality is the ‘‘normal’’ form of desire/sexual orientation, which permits marital relations and reproductive kinship only between people of opposite sexes. The relatively recent extension of rights to marriage, for example, to LGBTIQ couples is thus arguably predicated on the extent to which these citizens conform to or mirror the patterns and requirements of heteronormativity and its models of domestic sociality and sexual norms.
This chapter offers a consideration of the ways in which heteronormative ideologies are aligned with the nationalist secular liberal policies of the nation-state and examines the intersection of these ideologies and policies with race, religiosity, and sexuality. The first section of the chapter provides an overview of scholarly debates that address the centrality of gender in the formation of the nation-state historically. Gender underpins discourses of heterosexual national inclusion and exclusion and makes compliant and conservative heteronormative subjectivities the ground of citizenry. The next section extends the analysis to an assessment of the ways in which sexuality also provides a means of drawing up national boundaries where the nation-state is represented as intrinsically heteronormative. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, concepts of national identity have been extended to allow for the incorporation of homonormative models of citizenship. This section provides a detailed overview of the concept of homonationalism in the post-9/11 political context, setting out Puar’s (2007) theorization of the three phenomena that structure homonationalism: sexual exceptionalism, queerness as a regulatory norm, and white ascendancy. These three phenomena map the interweaving of race, gender, class, nation, and religion, enabling the self-representation of the United States as a civilized and civilizing force for good. This section also attends to the ways in which homonationalism functions both biopolitically (Foucault 2003, 2008) and necropolitically (Mbembe 2003)— that is, as determining which populations are worthy of life and protection (biopolitics) and which are seen as threatening and thus targets for elimination or subjection to colonial domination (necropolitics).
The subsequent section deals with the relationship between religion and the particular nationalist imaginary that claims ‘‘God is on our side,’’ a claim that supports discourses of nationalism, racism, and homophobia but also latterly homonationalism. The hostile attitude of mainstream US Christian discourse toward homosexuality and gender equality are highlighted. The following and concluding section then lays out the ways in which gay and lesbian theologies, seeking to counter Christian homophobia, nonetheless engage in the elevation of homonormativity and homonationalism. Finally, the chapter offers an overview of radical queer theologies, exemplified in the work of Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, which undo conceptions of God as being on the side of the imperialist nation-state.
With striking regularity, a number of ancient cosmogonies narrate male gods as progenitors, as sole creators of the world and initiators of temporal orders; that is, they set up the instruments—celestial bodies or seasonal arrangements, for example—by which the passing of time can be marked, and they establish this-worldly structures of governance and power. Three such cosmogonies are considered in this chapter: the Babylonian Enuma Elish ¯ , the Hebrew creation story in the book of Genesis, and the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s Theogony and the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Each myth portrays creation in terms of male parthenogenesis (asexual or monogenetic reproduction), using metaphors of birth-giving that appropriate or overturn female birth-giving capacities and setting up gods and thus origins and creation as paternal in nature. As this chapter shows, male procreation in these cosmogonies legitimizes social structures that emphasize the priority and primacy of male relationships (for example, father-son or fraternal bonds) and activities. In turn, the myths represent femaleness as passive, secondary to, dependent on, or vanquished by the male. Further, the characteristics of human maleness are implicitly connected to those of a divine male progenitor, linking God and man in a direct line of succession.
This chapter explores how such figurations of male creative power create temporal (that is, relating both to concepts of time and to this-worldly affairs), social, and gendered orders. The relationship between origin myths, gender structures, and the social outworking of patrilineal orders is examined in order to demonstrate the pivotal role that male creator gods play in legitimating and naturalizing male-dominated power formations. The first section outlines the methodological principles by which myths in general and origin myths in particular may be understood to legitimize certain social arrangements and power formations and override others. The next sections provide three examples of origin myths from the ancient Near East and Greece that narrate creation through male parthenogenesis and the subsequent social order underpinned by patrilineal authority. The subsequent section identifies how the gendered motifs and structures they promote and naturalize enable both restrictive gender valuations and top-down social organization, which in turn direct a wide range of social formations that operate on principles of inclusion and exclusion.
a more generalisable pattern of the forgetfulness of Christianity’s debts to other modalities, ontologies, and narratives in the quest to establish itself as pure, singular, monolingual, and monochrome. The Tree of Jesse serves as a particular and important example of the patrilineal
and fraternal affiliations and disaffiliations in the trajectory of the genealogy of the family tree, motivated by desires to support claims to pedigree and patrimony, reversed from a model of descent to one of ascent with the European “Aryans.”
Keywords: postcoloniality, religion and gender, catachresis, displacement, value-coding.
"
The Project’s output, as presented here, is in a handbook form rather than a short and concise guide to decolonising philosophy curricula. As the team’s work developed, we collectively realised that, beyond providing a practical manual (the toolkit), it was necessary to provide the theoretical underpinnings of what we have understood the work of decolonising philosophy to be. After all, doing needs to be accompanied by thinking. As such, in this document, you will find an overview of the historical, institutional, and political context in which we work and what moved staff towards developing the UK’s only ‘World Philosophies’ undergraduate degree programme; §1 an extended argument for why decolonising the philosophy curriculum is required; §2 a detailed guide to implementing critical
pedagogy in one’s practice; §3 an extended argument for decolonising assessment and formative activities in philosophy programmes; and §4 an example of how an epistemology module can be transformed to reflect decolonising principles as well as to provide students with a much richer account of the value and place of epistemological practices. Throughout the handbook, we have provided a list of references and additional sources to assist teachers and students in engaging with the recommendations we make.
The project is orientated around the following objectives:
▪ To face up honestly to and shed light on the ways in which Anglo-European racism, imperialism, and colonialism have adversely affected the organisation, learning content, classroom environment, formative learning activities, and summative assessment diet of philosophy curricula in the UK (and in the Anglo-European context more broadly). No one can reasonably deny that one of the multiple legacies of western imperial domination—especially the European colonisation of Africa, South Asia, South East Asia, North America, Central America, and South America8—has been (i) a racialised account of what counts as authoritative knowledge; (ii) a racialised account of whose knowledge matters; and (iii) a racialised account of what takes pride of place in what education institutions teach and how education institutions teach and assess that learning content.
▪ To offer constructive and implementable suggestions for expanding and transforming existing philosophy curricula at secondary and tertiary education levels, so that teachers and learners have richer, more in-depth, inclusive, and uplifting pedagogical experiences. This progressive discourse, as we will detail in subsequent sections, focuses on salient themes from critical
pedagogy.
▪ To provide teachers and learners with effective ways of, what we call, redirecting the flow of epistemic power away from the Anglo-European world that is ideologically positioned at the ‘centre’10 to a horizontal, comparative, and dialogical model in which no geolocation occupies a privileged position. In this way, thinking in terms of world philosophies is the sublation of philosophy itself, to the point that philosophy as the love of wisdom logically requires practicing deep thinking and reflection in a global, critical, and comparative manner.
The MA Religion in Global Politics offers an opportunity to examine these questions and issues at an advanced level by studying the complex relationships between religion and politics in the histories and contemporary political contexts (both national and international) of the regions of the Asia, Africa and the Middle East. A core objective is to challenge the Eurocentrism of current debates around secularism, secularisation, the nature of the public sphere within modernity, by indicating the plurality and contested nature of conceptions of both religion and the secular when considered in a global framework.
The programme is unique: it has a regional focus and disciplinary breadth rarely addressed in similar programmes in the subject area, draws on a wealth of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives (Law, International Relations and Politics, History, Philosophy, Development, Anthropology, Migration and Diaspora Studies, and Gender Studies, amongst others) and has a rigorous theoretical basis built in, such that students will be familiarised with the current state-of-the-art debates regarding religion in the public sphere, secularisms, postsecularism, and political theology and their relevance to issues of democracy, war, violence, human rights, humanitarianism and development, multiculturalism, nationalism, sectarianism, religious extremism, and free speech amongst others. The range of course options available on the programme is unparalleled, ensuring that students will benefit from a truly interdisciplinary, intellectually rigorous, and regionally focused programme.
This course will offer a comprehensive overview of the various debates around, and theorisations of the nature of secularism and the role of religion in the public sphere in order to we attend to the central issue of how 'the secular' is constituted, understood, and instantiated in both domestic and international or transnational contexts. Other related topics will also be examined, taking a thematic approach, such as the relationship between religious discourses and political violence, the legislative difficulties presented by contradictions in liberalist political principles that underpin the political systems of the global North and models of multiculturalism, theocratic conceptions of the state, the role of religion in identity politics and transnational institutions, and state responses to religious identity claims and priorities, free speech and blasphemy, and religious discrimination amongst others.
Historically, the study of religions has tried to provide a means of sympathetically exploring and understanding the diverse cultures, beliefs and practices of the world using a variety of methodological approaches and orientations. However, contemporary critical theories have problematised these approaches, suggesting that in spite of claims within the Study of Religions to apparent neutrality or empathy, unreflexive scholarly methods and assumptions continue to universalise the category of ‘religion’ and play a significant role in producing and maintaining western imperialist knowledge formations within the field. This third-year undergraduate course provides a survey of these criticisms alongside an advanced overview of three main bodies of critical theory (poststructuralist, postcolonial, and gender theory with attention also paid to disabilities and queer studies), plotting the intersections and points of departure between them. We will trace their implications for the academic study of religions and for the wider ‘politics of location’ within the western academy, asking whether there is a future for the study of religions and if so, what its task might be.