Description

This book argues that theories of embodiment and religion co-produce one another through classificatory acts, simultaneously adhering to bodies and authorizing knowledge.

Rather than choosing between material religion's focus on sensation or poststructuralist accounts of power and performativity, Jessica A. Albrecht treats the body as a medium which translates between being and knowing. This act of translation through the body is not a neutral transfer of knowledge but a generative process through which meanings, boundaries, and "religion" itself are made. Across chapters on intersectionality, standpoint and whiteness, queer and cuír theory, crip and mad studies, and trans theory, the book traces counter-genealogies that provincialize secular frames and show how bodies become unintelligible within regimes of religion, race, gender, and ability. In doing so, Albrecht advances a method of responsibility by historically and politically situating bodies and theories, exposing how "religion" is redefined through its relation to the body. The resulting framework for religious studies rejects traditional binaries between "theory" and "praxis" and, instead, is rigorously theoretical and insistently embodied.