Engaging the AAR theme of futures, this panel examines how religious traditions construct, regulate, and reimagine bodies across contexts shaped by gender, age, ecology, and power. The papers move from Islamic legal and devotional discourses on aging female bodies, to Indigenous feminist engagements with Choctaw ceremonial life and ecological kinship, to Vietnamese Catholic women negotiating layered patriarchies, and to a theological critique of fatphobia as a form of structural sin within Christian history. Across these papers, the body emerges as a site where norms are enforced but also contested and transformed. Each paper identifies resources within tradition—legal, ritual, communal, and theological—that enable alternative futures grounded in dignity, relationality, and justice. By foregrounding embodied experience and structural critique, the panel advances a vision of religious futures attentive to repair, survivance, and institutional accountability.
Scholarship on religion and the body has examined sexuality, purity, and bodily discipline but rarely considers how aging transforms the moral classification of bodies. This paper argues that Islamic traditions regulated female embodiment across the life course by distinguishing between the sexually disruptive body of the young woman and the desexualized body of the elderly woman. Drawing on Islamic legal discourse, waqf endowments, and Sufi hagiography, it shows how aging reconfigured norms governing women’s visibility, mobility, and bodily interaction. Once no longer associated with fitna, elderly women could appear in courts, establish endowments, and participate in devotional life, revealing how regimes of purity and bodily discipline shifted across the life course.
As we collectively imagine future/s, insights from the Choctaw Green Corn Ceremony inspire reconnection with Mother Earth, invigorate rematriation (Maracle 1988), attend to the wisdom of our ancestors, and encourage harmonious relationships. From an Indigenous feminist perspective, hopeful future/s require practices of culture-keeping such as storytelling, which demand the active presence of the community. Prior to removal from the sacred homeland of the Choctaws, the Green Corn Ceremony was the epicenter of social and spiritual celebrations (Pesantubbee 2005). This paper will explore the key elements of this tradition that relate to kinship with Mother Earth and Father Sky, gratitude for harvest, renewal of the sun, reminder of death, ecological importance of corn, and matrilineal leadership. Choctaw wisdom from this tragically lost ceremony offers fruitful possibilities to shape survivance for our world and its creatures, including the human ones.
Vietnamese Catholicism is culturally influenced by a double layer of patriarchy: Confucianism and traditional interpretations of Catholicism. Confucian teachings, introduced through a thousand years of rule by the Chinese Han Dynasty, subordinate women in most aspects of life and have become the norm for Vietnamese social relationships and order. Likewise, the patriarchal mindset of the Catholic tradition and biblical passages that subordinate women not only reinforce but divinize Confucian thought and practices in Vietnam. Within this context, Vietnamese Catholic women struggle for equality to find their place in the Church. In this paper, I examine the gaps in gender equality and the context for women in the Vietnamese Church to recommend ways for the Vietnamese Church to improve gender equality, which I call ‘A Future in Negotiation.’ This analysis seeks to empower Vietnamese Catholic women to challenge patriarchal structures and establish a point for dialogue with male Church leaders.
Engaging with Sabrina Strings’ genealogical account of fatphobia’s Protestant origins, Michelle Lelwica’s analysis of diet culture as secularized soteriology, and clinical literature documenting weight stigma as a source of measurable trauma this paper argues that the chronic psychological harm fat people carry is not incidental to Christian theological history—it is, in significant part, its product. Applying this framework of social sin to establish the tradition’s structural complicity in the production of this harm, the paper further demonstrates that Christian communities function as sites of theological amplification, intensifying secular fat stigma through the doctrinal encoding of somatic hierarchy as moral and spiritual failure. The paper then turns constructively to retrieve tradition’s own resources as grounds for a reparative theological anthropology, refusing to condition human dignity on somatic conformity, concluding with an account of what institutional repentance requires. This is justice for fat people—liberation from oppressive systems rooted in religion.