This session features four papers that investigate the shifting nature of bodies, sexualities, and their meanings across cultural, national, and religious contexts. The language of sex, sexual and erotic literacy, and how these are shaped by nationalistic and medical discourses all illuminate why and how change happens. Do our views, expressions, and tolerances of sexuality and bodies shift when we are given new languages and/or new political and religious contexts? Or are those limits overwhelmed by lived, embodied experiences requiring, even demanding, a re-making and re-telling of these narratives. Each of these questions offers us a framework for thinking about how the presence of bodies points us toward the future of sex.
This paper asks: Do queer Zimbabwean Exists? as an extension of Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s book title - Do Zimbabweans Exist? - in which he deploys postcolonial nationalism through frames such as ethnicity and violence in Zimbabwe. This study uses sexuality to deconstruct the official nationalism undergirded and articulated through alliances between state power, religious conservatism, and heteronormative constructions of citizenship. As such, I examine instantiations where queer persons and movements destabilise political and religious symbols deployed in the making of the postcolonial nation in Zimbabwe.
How do religious communities teach people to understand sexuality, and what kinds of futures do those teachings imagine? Within conservative American evangelicalism, sexual knowledge has often been framed through purity culture, complementarian theology, and instruction on marriage and gender roles. These teachings do more than regulate behavior. They provide an interpretive matrix through which believers learn to understand desire and self-sovereignty. This paper examines evangelical sexual literacy through memoirs by former evangelicals (exvangelicals), including Jamie Lee Finch, Glennon Doyle, Matthias Roberts, and Linda Kay Klein. Reading these narratives together, I explore how sexual teachings were internalized and later reenvisioned through deconversion. Methodologically, I treat memoir as a site of religious reflection in which former evangelicals wrestle with earlier instruction and emerge with new meaning-making. These narratives not only reveal how evangelical sexual literacy is formed, but how it is contested and reworked in a post-evangelical future.
This paper argues that kink, understood not as sexual transgression but as an embodied practice of negotiating power, vulnerability, and pleasure, offers a critical site for theorizing "demonic possibilities": the capacity of liminal peoples to create joy, relationality, and livable worlds within and against systems designed to render them invisible. Drawing on Black studies, Indigenous thought, and queer theory, I propose that kink enacts a demonic ethics born from outside the dominant order, seeping through its fissures. The paper grounds this argument theologically, revealing how Christian moral frameworks imposed normative sexuality as a colonial project, and refuses to theorize kink as universally liberatory, instead attending to how race, gender, and coloniality shape access to erotic world-making. I offer demonic kink ethics as a framework that refuses the reproductive, marital, and national logics through which religious traditions have organized sexual meaning.