In response to this year's Presidential theme, CARV seeks to foment a generative dialogue about how the "work of our hands" as religion scholars is descended from, complicit with, or otherwise appropriated to amplify any form of violence. The scholars featured on this panel, as well as the group discussion to follow, will engage with difficult questions about the historical legacies of violence; the fear of violence; active campaigns of violence; and/or the desire to use scholarship as a vehicle to either incite or resist violent actors. This panel’s ultimate purpose is thus to develop a discussion that assists religion scholars in reckoning with the ways in which their work knowingly or unknowingly contributes to discursive iterations of myriad species of violence. This session works intentionally from the margins to disrupt traditional systems of authority and ways of learning, knowing, and being in the world.
Gender-based violence (GBV) is not a protected ground within the U.S. asylum system. For a victim of GBV to win asylum, they must connect the violence they suffered to persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or particular social group. Typically, legal practitioners propose that GBV is a form of political persecution, citing that all resistance to GBV is a form of feminist politics. Through an examination of asylum documents, I show how the assumption of a feminist subjectivity is an act of violence, that denies their clients’ religious identities and also actual, physical violence against the women when the U.S. deports her back into danger. I demonstrate how asylum-seeking women already utilize religious reasonings to describe their persecution, and thus argue that incorporating religion as a strategy to argue GBV cases could help prevent deportations.
My paper explores the theological-aesthetic potential of qur’ānic verses that describe, sanction, or call for violence. Passages in the Qur’ān that feature or even revel in violence are commonly viewed as problematic. They are often ignored, essentialized, apologetically explained away, or reduced to their historical contingency. However, a narratively oriented, pre-imperial reading of such verses reveals their hermeneutic depth and opens new possibilities for their literary-aesthetic appreciation. I argue that violence in the Qur’ān serves a particular aesthetic-ethical purpose, that is, to urge believers to critical self-reflection and God-consciousness. Taking the Qur’ān seriously as both a linear text and a speech act aimed at rhetorical effect in particular historical situations directs our attention to the complexity of the reading process and challenges both textual and historical positivism.
The process of attending to the trauma of others is itself “traumagenic”-- that is, it can lead to traumatic overwhelm in the caregiver. Yet religious practice and spirituality arise as indicators of resilience in the face of secondary traumatic stress and as a means of healing from it. Spiritual practice is a mark of greater capacity in a trauma caregiver for attending to the trauma of others without folding under the traumatic pressure themselves. This paper explores the way in which the “sacrifice” of caregivers enduring secondary traumatic stress helps to re-theorize sacrifice. The sacrifice seen in the sacred attention of those helping to heal the trauma of others exemplifies a form of sacrifice which is both nonviolent and oddly self sustaining rather than self depleting. The re-theorized sacrifice of caregivers experiencing secondary traumatic stress offers a concrete example for theoretical engagements of sacred self sacrifice beyond violence.