In-person November Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

Kam Louie's wen-wu paradigm offers valuable insights into elite Chinese masculinity, yet the case of eunuchs in Buddhist contexts demonstrates how lived experiences of gender-nonconforming individuals revealed alternative paths to masculine identity and authority. Despite vinaya codes explicitly barring eunuchs from ordination, historical records from Ming China reveal their presence within monasteries, either seeking refuge from court life or entering religious service after retirement. How did temples reconcile canonical prohibition with the presence of powerful eunuch benefactors seeking spiritual refuge? What negotiations occurred when palace eunuchs exchanged court life for monastic robes? Drawing on vinaya texts, temple records, and patronage accounts, this investigation explores how Buddhist institutions reconciled doctrinal restrictions with the lived experiences of eunuchs who sought monkhood. It further looks into how eunuchs, as both patrons and monastics, shaped Buddhist institutions, leveraging influence to negotiate their place within the monastic order.

This study examines how lower-level clerics in Qing China maintained familial ties, thereby challenging the gender norms imposed by their religious tradition. It highlights the tension between the idealized clerical conduct prescribed in monastic regulations and the lived experiences of monks who remained embedded in kinship and community networks. Drawing on underutilized criminal case records, this research adopts Matthew Sommer’s framework of Buddhist monasticism as a form of transgender practice, expanding current understandings of gender fluidity in late imperial China. While existing scholarship on Buddhist masculinities has largely focused on normative ideals and prescriptive sources, this study shifts attention to the everyday negotiations of monastic masculinity. In doing so, this work contributes to broader discussions on gender diversity and the lived realities of clerical life in late imperial China.

My paper argues for the category of the religious healer to be included in the conversation regarding Chinese masculinities. Using the case study of a contemporary Chinese American healer who employs qigong, fengshui, acupressure massage, and Buddhist chants, I explain how this religious healer attends to wounds in his community and for himself. Admitting one’s wounds and need for healing is a vulnerability not typically associated with masculinity. Through the dominant the lens of Chinese masculinity, the wen-wu (civil and martial) dyad, this healer had multiple teachers and is an autodidact, and practices baguaquan, a form of boxing martial arts. However, my case study aims to interrogate how my subject’s role as a religious healer moves beyond wen-wu. The theoretical contribution is to highlight what has been missing in scholarship on Chinese masculinities: physical touch and intimacy in the healer-patient relationship. His healing is not only physical, but also soteriological.

This study examines the Nine Emperor Gods Festival through a gender-focused lens, making two key contributions to the study of masculinity and male dominance. First, it demonstrates how masculinity is not only embedded in the festival’s structure but continually reinforced through ritual, myth, and institutional authority. In postcolonial Southeast Asia, sworn brotherhoods fostered a homosocial environment that shaped the festival’s leadership, securing male control over ritual space and religious power. Second, this study introduces the “peripheralizing impulse”, a mechanism that systematically relegates women to secondary or symbolic roles across individual, institutional, and cultic domains. Despite social and demographic shifts, the festival’s male-dominated hierarchy persists, sustained by historical inertia and evolving gendered exclusions that uphold masculine religious authority. By tracing the festival’s history across East and Southeast Asia, this study reveals how entrenched gendered power structures persist and adapt, ensuring the continuity of male dominance despite broader societal change.

Kam Louie's wen-wu paradigm offers valuable insights into elite Chinese masculinity, yet the case of eunuchs in Buddhist contexts demonstrates how lived experiences of gender-nonconforming individuals revealed alternative paths to masculine identity and authority. Despite vinaya codes explicitly barring eunuchs from ordination, historical records from Ming China reveal their presence within monasteries, either seeking refuge from court life or entering religious service after retirement. How did temples reconcile canonical prohibition with the presence of powerful eunuch benefactors seeking spiritual refuge? What negotiations occurred when palace eunuchs exchanged court life for monastic robes? Drawing on vinaya texts, temple records, and patronage accounts, this investigation explores how Buddhist institutions reconciled doctrinal restrictions with the lived experiences of eunuchs who sought monkhood. It further looks into how eunuchs, as both patrons and monastics, shaped Buddhist institutions, leveraging influence to negotiate their place within the monastic order.

This study examines how lower-level clerics in Qing China maintained familial ties, thereby challenging the gender norms imposed by their religious tradition. It highlights the tension between the idealized clerical conduct prescribed in monastic regulations and the lived experiences of monks who remained embedded in kinship and community networks. Drawing on underutilized criminal case records, this research adopts Matthew Sommer’s framework of Buddhist monasticism as a form of transgender practice, expanding current understandings of gender fluidity in late imperial China. While existing scholarship on Buddhist masculinities has largely focused on normative ideals and prescriptive sources, this study shifts attention to the everyday negotiations of monastic masculinity. In doing so, this work contributes to broader discussions on gender diversity and the lived realities of clerical life in late imperial China.

My paper argues for the category of the religious healer to be included in the conversation regarding Chinese masculinities. Using the case study of a contemporary Chinese American healer who employs qigong, fengshui, acupressure massage, and Buddhist chants, I explain how this religious healer attends to wounds in his community and for himself. Admitting one’s wounds and need for healing is a vulnerability not typically associated with masculinity. Through the dominant the lens of Chinese masculinity, the wen-wu (civil and martial) dyad, this healer had multiple teachers and is an autodidact, and practices baguaquan, a form of boxing martial arts. However, my case study aims to interrogate how my subject’s role as a religious healer moves beyond wen-wu. The theoretical contribution is to highlight what has been missing in scholarship on Chinese masculinities: physical touch and intimacy in the healer-patient relationship. His healing is not only physical, but also soteriological.

This study examines the Nine Emperor Gods Festival through a gender-focused lens, making two key contributions to the study of masculinity and male dominance. First, it demonstrates how masculinity is not only embedded in the festival’s structure but continually reinforced through ritual, myth, and institutional authority. In postcolonial Southeast Asia, sworn brotherhoods fostered a homosocial environment that shaped the festival’s leadership, securing male control over ritual space and religious power. Second, this study introduces the “peripheralizing impulse”, a mechanism that systematically relegates women to secondary or symbolic roles across individual, institutional, and cultic domains. Despite social and demographic shifts, the festival’s male-dominated hierarchy persists, sustained by historical inertia and evolving gendered exclusions that uphold masculine religious authority. By tracing the festival’s history across East and Southeast Asia, this study reveals how entrenched gendered power structures persist and adapt, ensuring the continuity of male dominance despite broader societal change.

Kam Louie's wen-wu paradigm offers valuable insights into elite Chinese masculinity, yet the case of eunuchs in Buddhist contexts demonstrates how lived experiences of gender-nonconforming individuals revealed alternative paths to masculine identity and authority. Despite vinaya codes explicitly barring eunuchs from ordination, historical records from Ming China reveal their presence within monasteries, either seeking refuge from court life or entering religious service after retirement. How did temples reconcile canonical prohibition with the presence of powerful eunuch benefactors seeking spiritual refuge? What negotiations occurred when palace eunuchs exchanged court life for monastic robes? Drawing on vinaya texts, temple records, and patronage accounts, this investigation explores how Buddhist institutions reconciled doctrinal restrictions with the lived experiences of eunuchs who sought monkhood. It further looks into how eunuchs, as both patrons and monastics, shaped Buddhist institutions, leveraging influence to negotiate their place within the monastic order.

This study examines how lower-level clerics in Qing China maintained familial ties, thereby challenging the gender norms imposed by their religious tradition. It highlights the tension between the idealized clerical conduct prescribed in monastic regulations and the lived experiences of monks who remained embedded in kinship and community networks. Drawing on underutilized criminal case records, this research adopts Matthew Sommer’s framework of Buddhist monasticism as a form of transgender practice, expanding current understandings of gender fluidity in late imperial China. While existing scholarship on Buddhist masculinities has largely focused on normative ideals and prescriptive sources, this study shifts attention to the everyday negotiations of monastic masculinity. In doing so, this work contributes to broader discussions on gender diversity and the lived realities of clerical life in late imperial China.

My paper argues for the category of the religious healer to be included in the conversation regarding Chinese masculinities. Using the case study of a contemporary Chinese American healer who employs qigong, fengshui, acupressure massage, and Buddhist chants, I explain how this religious healer attends to wounds in his community and for himself. Admitting one’s wounds and need for healing is a vulnerability not typically associated with masculinity. Through the dominant the lens of Chinese masculinity, the wen-wu (civil and martial) dyad, this healer had multiple teachers and is an autodidact, and practices baguaquan, a form of boxing martial arts. However, my case study aims to interrogate how my subject’s role as a religious healer moves beyond wen-wu. The theoretical contribution is to highlight what has been missing in scholarship on Chinese masculinities: physical touch and intimacy in the healer-patient relationship. His healing is not only physical, but also soteriological.

This study examines the Nine Emperor Gods Festival through a gender-focused lens, making two key contributions to the study of masculinity and male dominance. First, it demonstrates how masculinity is not only embedded in the festival’s structure but continually reinforced through ritual, myth, and institutional authority. In postcolonial Southeast Asia, sworn brotherhoods fostered a homosocial environment that shaped the festival’s leadership, securing male control over ritual space and religious power. Second, this study introduces the “peripheralizing impulse”, a mechanism that systematically relegates women to secondary or symbolic roles across individual, institutional, and cultic domains. Despite social and demographic shifts, the festival’s male-dominated hierarchy persists, sustained by historical inertia and evolving gendered exclusions that uphold masculine religious authority. By tracing the festival’s history across East and Southeast Asia, this study reveals how entrenched gendered power structures persist and adapt, ensuring the continuity of male dominance despite broader societal change.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Soviet Union witnessed a rise in alternative new religious communities, inspired by Asian spiritual traditions. Lithuania, a former Soviet country, encountered these movements in the late 1970s, where they functioned as subcultures, fostering alternative belief systems and resistive networks against the Soviet ideology. Due to the strict control of public space and KGB surveillance, these groups were largely operating underground until the late 1980s, when Lithuania’s move towards independence allowed them to emerge into the public sphere, what sparked both public curiosity and increased media coverage in Lithuania. This paper examines media representations of the Asian-influenced alternative religious and spiritual movements during this time of crucial socio-political transformations. The paper argues that the media produced a specific “contact zone” (Pratt 2008), where discourses and debates on free speech, alternative spirituality, Orientalism, and globalization unfolded, shaping the post-independence Lithuanian identity.

The meteoric rise of the new religious movement of Santa Muerte has sparked fierce opposition from the Catholic Church and state authorities throughout the Americas. Once a clandestine folk devotion, Santa Muerte now commands a global following in the millions, attracting devotees from the marginalized fringes of society, including the urban poor, LGBTQ+ individuals, prisoners, and even cartel foot soldiers. Yet, her rapid ascent has drawn fire from the Vatican, which has branded the movement as satanic, and from law enforcement agencies that frequently associate her with criminality. This paper examines the ecclesiastical and governmental crackdown on Santa Muerte, analyzing the ideological and political forces driving this opposition and the broader implications for religious pluralism in the hemisphere.

In this paper, we examine promotional emails sent out by a Sikh New Religious movement (NRM) commonly known as 3HO/Sikh Dharma. The 3 Hs Organization, where the Hs stand for Happy, Healthy, and Holy (3HO)/Sikh Dharma International (SDI) community has been mired in controversy since 2020. Turning to organizational promotional emails, they help us understand community responses to this moment of crisis. Not only do these organizations reveal multiple strategies at cultivating a positive image, our analysis discusses how distinct religious landscapes shape organizational claims at a positive identity.

Media portrayals of New Religious Movements (NRMs) frequently employ two rhetorical strategies: delegitimization, which trivializes or ridicules, and demonization, which amplifies perceived threats. This paper explores how contemporary media representations of NRMs—particularly The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—utilize these opposing yet complementary tactics. Analyzing materials ranging from The Book of Mormon Musical and South Park to Under the Banner of Heaven and American Primeval, this study situates these portrayals within broader historical and cultural contexts. Drawing on rhetorical studies and cultural sociology, it examines how these strategies shape public perception and mobilize opposition to NRMs. Additionally, the paper considers how similar approaches have been deployed against other NRMs and how targeted groups respond to negative framing. By investigating these media dynamics, this research contributes to discussions on religious freedom, social inclusion, and the power structures that define mainstream versus marginal religious identities.

For the better part of two decades, actor and comedian Rainn Wilson has publicly pursued his passion for community-based spiritual inquiry. His recent book, Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution (2023), promotes secular-spiritual engagement with literally “anything concerning the divine”—including spiritual wisdom available through popular culture products such as television’s StarTrek and Kung Fu—as long as it contributes to the individual and social renewal that, in his view, is critical to keeping humanity from its own destruction. Especially palatable to those who affiliate as Spiritual but not Religious or “Nones,” Wilson’s sincere yet ironic, disarmingly quirky presentation of universalist grand narratives aims to engage our contemporary, mediatized moment. It will be read here through the lens of metamodern theory (per Vermeulen and van den Akker) and understood as an example of a trend of “metamodernization" that characterizes some contemporary spiritual figures. 

This paper follows the figure of Prāṇnāth (c. 1618-1694), the preeminent religious preacher of the Praṇāmī order (sampradāya). Straddling Kṛṣṇa-centered Vaiṣṇavism and Nizārī Ismā‘īlism—as well as a range of courtly spaces from Shahjahanabad/Delhi to Panna (Bundelkhand)—Prāṇnāth fashioned himself into a Mahdī, or messiah, in the line of Kṛṣṇa, Muḥammad, and Christ. In my paper, I closely examine a Hindavī text from the Praṇāmī scriptural corpus expressly addressed to the Muslims of Hindustān. I study the text’s (and more generally, Prāṇnāth’s) incorporation of Qurʾānic eschatology into Vaiṣṇava cosmology, as well as its social purport of transcending orthodoxies and immiscible sectarian differences. Indic sampradāyas, this paper aims to argue, often encountered Islam in ways that were neither fleeting nor so exogenous as to be incapable of transforming those very traditions. In the main, I hope to revisit prevailing heuristic habits of treating the ‘Indic’ and the ‘Islamic’ as separable civilizational matrices intersecting only under asymmetrical conditions.

It is a common view among scholars of South Asian Islam that Muslims in colonial India internalized Victorian sexual norms and distanced themselves from classical Persian texts due, in large part, to their erotic and homoerotic content. This paper challenges this ‘derivative discourse’ of social and religious change by exploring a parallel tradition of engagement with Persian literature. While some “modernist” Muslim intellectuals, mostly those with close ties to the colonial state, sought to discredit the sexual norms of classical Persian and Urdu literature, commercial publishing houses continued to circulate these texts widely, often with interpretive frames that signaled their enduring relevance to a broad readership. An early modern tradition of engaging Persian literature not only survived but reached new audiences through the medium of print. I demonstrate the point by drawing on the Indian reception of a thirteenth-century Persian text that became one of the most printed books in nineteenth-century India: the Gulistan (Rose-Garden) of Saʿdi.

Mughal Princess Jahanara (d.1681) had a curious experience of Islam. Mughal political zeitgeist forbade princesses, her generation onwards, from fulfilling the religious duty of heterosexual marriage. And Sufism, whose practitioners have often flouted the marriage injunction, allowed her to go only so far; she was not granted spiritual succession to Maulana Shah for being a woman. However, Jahanara’s privilege as the princess of the contemporary world’s wealthiest empire helped her deal with this situation creatively: She constructed Agra’s central mosque and a porch at Moinuddin Chishti’s dargah, both of which reserved, and have continued to reserve, spaces for women worshipers. What also continues at the mosque till date is the use of henna, a material with strong connotations of marriage and fecundity in Persianate cultures. In her writings, Jahanara astutely undoes Persian’s gender-neutrality, to assert an emphatic female voice. These, she did by neither transgressing rebelliously nor risking politico-religious perpetration. 

In the southern Indian state of Kerala, velichappatus (ritual possession specialists) have been attempting to redefine their ritual activities as work to secure fair compensation from the State-administered temple governing boards. In 2008, velichappatus from across the state formed a trade union-like collective I will refer to as the Bhagavathy Komaram Sangham (BKS) to demand healthcare benefits and pensions from the state government.  In the last few years, the mandate of this collective has expanded to include socio-cultural and legal activities undertaken to uphold the Goddess’s sovereignty and authority. In this paper, I trace the story of Kamala, a founding member of the BKS and examines what serving the Goddess means to ritual actors like the velichappatu. In attempting to translate worship as a form of work, what ethical aspirations are velichappatus trying to articulate, and what kinds of ethical communities are they creating?

Given the current political turmoil that excludes immigrants, and refugees in the US, this paper revisits Calvin, and examines the theo-political implications of his sacramental ecclesiology in the context of exile. I explore how he resisted exclusionary structures, particularly in relation to the Corpus Christianum, which sought social purity at the cost of producing countless refugees. Through an analysis of the Eucharist and its relation to the church, I trace the inversion of corpus mysticum and corpus verum, which shifted the church’s foundation from sacramental practice to legal structures. I will argue that Calvin, within the framework of the threefold body of Christ, seeks to restore the severed link between the Eucharist and the Church, a bond that began to weaken after the twelfth century, in a way that does not make any visible community sovereign, and that he instead envisions the church as a performative space of radical inclusion. 

The only direct textual evidence we have concerning Jonathan Edwards’ views on slavery comes from a cryptic draft of a polemical letter he wrote defending a pro-slavery New England pastor against his anti-slavery parishioners. Though much ink has been spilled about this draft letter, Edwards scholarship has largely focused on reconstructing the social-historical conditions around the controversy. Comparatively little attention has been paid to how Edwards’ philosophical and theological commitments may have informed his views on slavery. In this paper we use the letter to attempt a rational reconstruction of Edwards’s views on slavery. Our close reading of the letter examines Edwards’s biblical and philosophical for coherence and compatibility. We then suggest that Edwards’s commitments may reflect the influence of Augustine’s case for the justice of slavery (with which Edwards was no doubt familiar). The result, we hope, is an Edwards whose pro-slavery views are clarified in light of his intellectual debts.  

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I will consider the role of prophecy in the vita of late medieval women such as Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Elisabeth of Reute, and Colette of Corbie. This presentation will examine why prophetic gifts were especially emphasized in the discussion of saintly women in the Late Middle Ages. I will discuss the increasing public activism of saintly and prophetic women. Finally, I will ask how prophecy was used as a legitimation strategy for these women and on the other hand how somatic experiences legitimated their prophecies.

In the summer of 1712, María López, a teenage Maya girl in the Chiapas highlands, proclaimed to have spoken with an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told her that Spanish colonialism would soon end. By early August, thousands of Maya “soldiers of the Virgin,” rose up in the Tzeltal Revolt, one of the largest and most radical Indigenous revolts in Spanish America before 1750. Throughout the rebellion, María López continued to relay the Virgin’s directives, dressed in priestly vestments, and presided alongside newly ordained Maya Catholic priests. Lopez could neither read nor write, but I argue she acted as an Indigenous intellectual, navigating gender restrictions and establishing her prophetic authority through a keen awareness of the sociopolitical context of Chiapas’ Maya highlands and creative intellectual engagement with European and Maya Christian prophetic traditions. 

In this article I will try to survey both secondary and primary sources, providing a simple historical overview of female shamans, diviners and spirit mediums in China. The terminology, both in Chinese and in English, can be confusing. The term ‘divination’, as used in secondary literature, mostly describes the activities of prognostication of elite males. Women are present, but are a minority, and understood to be fairly irrelevant. In spirit-inspired forms of divination, like shamanism and spirit mediumship, on the other hand, women are not only present but widely disseminated across several practices and audiences, and actively engaged. My approach is broad and tries to encompass all of the above practices, foregrounding women’s activities, highlighting similarities over time but also differences.

I will consider the role of prophecy in the vita of late medieval women such as Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Elisabeth of Reute, and Colette of Corbie. This presentation will examine why prophetic gifts were especially emphasized in the discussion of saintly women in the Late Middle Ages. I will discuss the increasing public activism of saintly and prophetic women. Finally, I will ask how prophecy was used as a legitimation strategy for these women and on the other hand how somatic experiences legitimated their prophecies.

In the summer of 1712, María López, a teenage Maya girl in the Chiapas highlands, proclaimed to have spoken with an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told her that Spanish colonialism would soon end. By early August, thousands of Maya “soldiers of the Virgin,” rose up in the Tzeltal Revolt, one of the largest and most radical Indigenous revolts in Spanish America before 1750. Throughout the rebellion, María López continued to relay the Virgin’s directives, dressed in priestly vestments, and presided alongside newly ordained Maya Catholic priests. Lopez could neither read nor write, but I argue she acted as an Indigenous intellectual, navigating gender restrictions and establishing her prophetic authority through a keen awareness of the sociopolitical context of Chiapas’ Maya highlands and creative intellectual engagement with European and Maya Christian prophetic traditions. 

In this article I will try to survey both secondary and primary sources, providing a simple historical overview of female shamans, diviners and spirit mediums in China. The terminology, both in Chinese and in English, can be confusing. The term ‘divination’, as used in secondary literature, mostly describes the activities of prognostication of elite males. Women are present, but are a minority, and understood to be fairly irrelevant. In spirit-inspired forms of divination, like shamanism and spirit mediumship, on the other hand, women are not only present but widely disseminated across several practices and audiences, and actively engaged. My approach is broad and tries to encompass all of the above practices, foregrounding women’s activities, highlighting similarities over time but also differences.