This panel will examine the connections between materiality and masculinity as broadly understood across multiple contexts and methodologies within the field of Religious Studies. Materials are often components of both the construction of masculinity and religious lives, yet are less often analyzed as a point of connection. By analyzing not only materials that signify masculine expression such as hair and clothing but also artistic expressions of idealized beings, this panel examines a broad spectrum of masculinity and materiality in cultural, and subcultural, constructions. In addition, this panel will also examine how the materials of the archive are not inert, but rather are an active participant involved in these constructions through the preservation of discourse around masculinity. This panel will demonstrate the fundamental materiality within religious preservation and subversion of masculinity and masculine identity with important implications for masculinity studies within many fields beyond the foci of these papers.
In late antiquity, several hagiographies of assigned female saints who presented themselves as men were popular among Christian audiences. One such saint, Matrona of Perge (5th century), entered a monastery in Constantinople as a eunuch named Babylas. In the earliest version of Matrona’s hagiography, Matrona was given permission to found her own monastery and to wear traditionally male habits. Moreover, she was made an *episkopos* (overseer/bishop) and given the power to lay on hands. The use of male habits and this level of authority held by someone assigned female has yet to be fully examined. Through the use of transgender studies, this presentation will argue that authority can be understood as yet another form of masculine embodiment represented through male habits, rather than view masculine presentation as a way for Matrona to gain authority.
This paper examines the cisnormative passage that the representations of Baphomet go through, from a dually-sexed, androgynous, anthropomorphic goat-person drawn by Éliphas Lévi to a rebellious figure connected to Satan/Lucifer with his breasts intentionally removed by the Satanic Temple. This removal, an intentional action of censorship, is then mimicked in popular television and popular culture. The removal of the breasts of the Baphomet by TST demonstrates a rejection of gender variance, an embrace of the masculine cisgender body, and a production of gender complementarity. Challenging historians of the devil like Jeffrey Burton Russell, this paper disrupts this expected outcome of Satanic figures as usually male (and occasionally female), and instead reintroduces the historically genderfucked Baphomet figure. This paper concludes by thinking through how the erasure of gender variance in the archives by contemporary Satanists provides an opportunity for Evangelical religious communities to claim sole ownership of a trans Baphomet.
Through an analysis of the image and legend of St. Wilgefortis, the folk princess saint who prayed to be delivered from a forced marriage arranged by her/their father to another pagan king and received a beard as her/their answer, this paper will explore the ways the bearded crucifix of St. Wilgefortis is a dangerous figure that transgressed gender boundaries and social norms with God’s blessing to become a symbol of hope for the oppressed. Analyzing the image and legacy of St. Wilgefortis through Elizabeth Grosz’s work on the pliability and plasticity of bodies, this paper argues that St. Wilgefortis is a model case to demonstrate that masculinity does not belong maleness and that masculinity’s definition and cultural location is malleable and not fixed.
This proposed paper explores a crisis of masculinity and heteronormativity in the University of Oregon’s Keith Stimely Collection on revisionist history and neo-fascist movements from the former chief editor for the *Journal of Historical Review* (JHR) which promoted revisionist historiography, most notably Holocaust denial. This critical discursive analysis highlights one of the more unexpected parts of the story Stimely’s archive tells us about American and European far-right political movements and networks in the 1970s and '80s which disseminated their ideas under the guise of scholarly discourse -- how a crisis of masculinity fueled inter- and intra-group hostilities at the Institute of Historical Review (IHR) after fellow organization leaders discovered that one of IHR founders was involved in gay porn. In doing so, I consider the historical spread of far-right fears involving sodomy, ‘gay infiltration,’ and/or ‘takeover’ during the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic through the means of late-stage print propaganda.
Sacred and devotional art turns the invisible of religious devotion and doctrine into material reality, reflecting both the theological and cultural ideals of a religious community. The art of Arnold Friberg has been used by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to craft an idealized Muscular Mormon Man. The carved physiques of Friberg’s subjects highlight a fascination with the male form, celebrating hypermasculinity by exaggerating sexual difference: hard versus soft, active versus passive, and male versus female. Friberg created male figures which not only adhered to but superseded western standards of male beauty and virility, homoerotic in their careful and loving detailing of the male body. His work gained prominence in the mid-Twentieth Century at a time when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was making efforts to assimilate into mainstream American culture and provided a template for creating idealized Muscular Mormon Men.