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New Book on ‘Blasphemous Art’!

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Books and major publications
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What insights can 'blasphemous art' give us into religion, gender and sexuality?

 

The Centre for Religion and Public Life is delighted to announce the publication of a new book, Blasphemous Art? Religion, Gender and Sexuality in Arts and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2025), which was co-edited by CRPL member Adriaan van Klinken. In this post, Adriaan answers our questions about this intriguing book.

 

How has this book come about?

This book was initially conceived as a Festschrift for Anne-Marie Korte, who earlier this year retired as Professor of Religion and Gender at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. My two co-editors (Nella van den Brandt and Mariecke van den Berg) and I are all former PhD students of Anne-Marie, and throughout the years we have benefitted greatly from her academic mentorship and her unique ability to create a nurturing environment for postgraduate students and early-career researchers. Thus, for this project we solicited contributions from scholars who have been supervised and/or mentored by, or have otherwise worked with, Anne-Marie, and/or who have been inspired by her work.

Anne-Marie’s work in recent years has focused on accusations of blasphemy surrounding performances in popular culture that are deemed to be transgressive regarding socio-cultural and religious norms of gender and sexuality. A well-known example is Madonna’s performance of the song “Live to Tell,” in which she is shown on a large lighted cross, wearing a crown of thorns, clearly alluding to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. This performance became the subject of public controversy and heated debate as it was perceived as offending Christian sensitivities. Anne-Marie, in her work, examines the question how cases like this offer us a lens to understand the complex relationship between religion, the body, gender and sexuality in late-modern and largely secularised Western societies.

In our book, we build and further develop this line of inquiry, analysing expressions of art and popular culture from various parts of the world, which have been associated with blasphemy or have otherwise been seen as transgressive. Thus, different from the traditional Festschrift, this book has a well-defined scholarly focus. Its aim is not only to honour Anne-Marie, but also to further advance her original and critical contribution to the interdisciplinary study of religion, gender and sexuality, and to utilise ‘blasphemous art’ as a productive lens. Doing so, our volume also extends the scope of Anne-Marie’s work, discussing case studies from a range of geographical regions, religious traditions, and various genres of art and popular culture, such as drama, film, comedy, poetry and literature.

What are the key argument(s) that the book develops?

As the religion scholar Linda Woodhead has succinctly observed: ‘Blasphemy has been in bed, so to speak, with sex for centuries.’ In other words, there is nothing new about accusations of blasphemy being directed towards people, communities and cultural expressions that are perceived as transgressing gendered and sexual norms. However, the form, content and context of those accusations, and of the social and cultural expressions to which they are directed, and of the gendered and sexual norms at stake in these controversies, has changed over time. One of the key arguments of our volume is that deliberately provocative forms of cultural and artistic production can be productive and can have liberating and empowering effects. They offer communities at the gendered, sexual and racialized margins of society an opportunity to tell their stories, (re)claim their bodies, and perform symbolic and sacred meaning. For instance, in my own contribution to this volume, I discuss two poems by black South African writers – the feminist activist and scholar Betty Govinden and the queer performance artist Kopano Margoga – about the experience of living with HIV. Both poems engage creatively and provocatively with biblical and Christian imagery and symbols, but they do so, not just for the sake of provocation but for the sake of reclaiming black HIV-positive bodies as sacred and blessed.

What insight does the book provide into the relationship between religion and public life?

Accusations of blasphemy directed at works of art and popular culture often become highly public controversies, which reveal the conflicts and tensions surrounding religion, secularity, and modernity, specifically in relation to issues of gender, sexuality and embodiment. Thus, these controversies themselves reveal the contested status of religion, but equally of gender and sexuality, in contemporary societies. In a way, many of the case studies presented in this book show how creative arts and cultural production are key public arenas where the dynamic relationships between religion, gender and sexuality are configured and reconfigured, interpreted and reimagined.

Give us one quote from the book that you believe will make us go and read it!

“A central question that Anne‑Marie Korte, among other scholars, has consistently pursued in her work is: ‘Why are the fields of embodiment, sexuality and gender the battlefields par excellence where the tensions between religion(s) and secularism are manifested in modern societies?’ Several contributors to this volume address and engage this question directly or indirectly, drawing attention to the complex and diverse ways in which the body continues to be a site of contestation between conflicting norms, ideals and values such as those associated with religion versus secularity, liberalism versus conservatism, private versus public, individualism versus community. Doing so, they also demonstrate that these binary categories themselves are in need of destabilizing and disrupting.”