This panel discusses how bodies become or are made sites through which religious subjects are formed, governed, and oriented toward particular futures across Jewish, Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu, and disability-theological contexts. The papers analyze reproductive nationalism in contemporary views of a Jewish futurity; Sufi hagiographies as guides for regulating bodily conduct; crip futures and theologies of body amid colonial violence and AI technologies; internal transformation by managing senses and emotions in Buddhist monastic life; and the Mahābhārata’s commentary on sensory discipline as the mode of moral formation. Together, these studies advance theoretical conversations on religious embodiment by demonstrating how affect and biopolitics shape religious bodies as epistemic, ethical, and future-oriented formations.
This paper considers the interlinked phenomena of childbirth, nation-building, and post-traumatic life in the American Jewish diaspora using the case study of a homemade protest sign at the March for Israel rally in November 2023. Irina Barskaya, an American Jewish woman who traveled to Washington for the March, brought with her a sign that read “Bring them home” on one side (a reference to the Israeli hostages taken captive by Hamas on October 7th) and on the other, “Who’s coming home with me? #MakeJewishBabies.” This sign is emblematic of the "continuity paradigm," a pro-natalist mentality that encourages solidarity and futuricity. It presents a successful, preservationist response to trauma, but it also produces biopolitical governmentalities that have the potential to harm Jewish futures, particularly when female Jewish bodies become sites of national reproduction. Ultimately, critical self-examination is required to avoid replicating broader nationalist paradigms and further compromising Jewish women's bodily autonomy.
This paper examines how hagiographical representations of saintly bodies shape “future bodies” through a close reading of the seventeenth-century North Indian verse hagiography Ḥaqīqat al-Fuqarāʾ. Depicting the Punjabi Sufi saint Shāh Ḥusayn (d. 1599) as an antinomian figure, the text offers an extended account of his bodily intimacy with a Brahmin boy named Mādhō. While acknowledging that such intimacy was seen as morally suspect in its context, the narrative reframes it as the saint’s distinctive mode of spiritual instruction. Drawing on recent scholarship in Hagiology, I argue that by juxtaposing the outer appearance and “inner reality” of the saint’s antinomian acts, the Ḥaqīqat interpellates its audience as subjects trained to privilege inner realities when evaluating others, while regulating their own bodily conduct in accordance with prevailing norms. Accordingly, this paper expands understandings of “future bodies” beyond technoscientific enhancement to include the narrative formation of ethically disciplined religious subjects.
The field of disability theologies continues to grow, especially in the so-called “West/Global North.” More voices are appearing from the “Global South” with cautions about how we speak about bodies, disabilities, responsibilities, and opportunities especially within the contexts of settler-colonialism, apartheid/genocide, access to care, and so on (Meekosha). In the world today AI and other technological advancements are rapidly changing healthcare and specifically care of disabled and imperiledbodies. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of bodies are being killed and maimed and land destroyed through AI systems and military operations (Loewenstein). Crip theorists like Jasbir Puar, Mia Mingus, and Alison Kafer, sit uncomfortably within this reality and still dream about crip futures ... futures where crip bodies are desired and we can recognize each other as well as advocate for the end of colonialism, occupation, maiming and genocide. Where might disability theologians sit?
This paper presents a case study from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a Theravada Bhikkhuni temple in Thailand, tracing how broad social forces narrow to individual subjectivities through affective, embodied experiences. I argue that emotion functions as the primary mechanism for subjective transformation, not purely as an expression of a ‘true’ inner self, but as an interpersonal and affective force that starts beyond the individual and is gradually internalized.
The case moves from a socially distant promise that temporary ordination will save a family member, through an embodied experience of monastic training, to how judgements of embodied monastic discipline produce emotional turbulence, even fourteen years later. The paper illuminates a process of subjective change I call ‘ExBodiment,’ in which external, intersubjective forces are gradually absorbed through the body to re/shape the very subjectivity through which one moves through the world.
Scholarship on the Hindu body has theorized bodily regulation through ritual purity, devotion, and medicine. While these frameworks focus on social and soteriological dimensions, they do not fully account for the cognitive elements of embodiment. I turn to the Mahābhārata, a Hindu epic, to argue that the text theorizes the body as an epistemic apparatus. I analyze three narratives— Arjuna's emotional breakdown at the eve of war, Nahuṣa’s curse to turn into a snake, and Pāṇḍu’s curse to die— in which the characters lose their capacity to judge due to sensory contact. I argue that the prescriptions about what the bodily senses contact—whether food, fragrant garlands, liquor, or sexual touch—share a concern about protecting the capacity to judge and act well. My analysis reveals an attitude toward the body where the senses are not primarily openings to pollution, but the instruments through which knowledge is accessed or blocked.