Much of the literature in science and religion has overlooked gender, and more specifically has tended to neglect work on the gendered body. The papers in this session aim to build new links between sex and gender studies and science and technology studies, religious studies, anthropology, and theology.
This paper proposes a multi-sited discussion of contemporary placemaking practices along Jewish heritage routes in Europe and the Mediterranean, drawing on original ethnographic research conducted at archaeological immersion pools (mikva’ot) in historic Jewish quarters. Now preserved by museums and municipal authorities as sites of national cultural and historical patrimony, hundreds of former immersion pools are largely memorialized as sacred spaces. Theatrical reenactments, graphic novels, and holographic projections featuring nude or semi-nude women bathing in stepped pools in France and Catalonia, for example, speak to deeply held fantasies of the “Jewess” descending to her mysterious bathing rites in distant times.
This paper throws light on the boundaries of archaeological knowledge production vis-à-vis modern interpretations of the historic built environment and the generative but considerable limitations of ethnographic methodologies in attempting to reconstruct the phenomenological and embodied experiences of purity rites in ancient contexts.
Fertilized embryos, especially those that are “left over” from assisted reproductive technologies, as well as remains after medication abortions at home, have become a politicized part of social, cultural, as well as religious life of reproduction in the United States. What happens when the way we view waste, and specifically “remains,” in a Western, Christian society, like the United States, becomes imbued with discourses of religious veracity, nationalism, and population control? In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille describes blood and tissue from the vagina (menstrual blood, birth, etc.) as dejected by Western society –we are disgusted by and scared of it, but at the same time we do not know what to do with it. Based on this notion, this project begins to uncover why, in our modern society, the fear of “remains” begins to control the ways we police pregnancy and reproductive capacities, through both religious and moral discourses.