Annual Meeting 2024 Program Book

Subjecting Michel Foucault’s schematization and theorization of biopolitics to Black critical thought is tending to the wounding that makes biopolitics possible and might also be the site of its refusal. Tending to the wounding is the site of the emergence of something called race and religion, the productivity of what Foucault calls biopower. At the same time, the site of life is marked by both Orlando Patterson’s ‘social death,’ and Hortense Spillers’s ‘flesh.’ Tending to the wounding of the emergence of biopolitics by way of Black critical figures such as Patterson and Spillers, allows for reconceiving of Foucault’s utility for the study of religion with acute attention to is constitutive antiblackness. The goal is to forestall the all-too-easy application of Foucault’s biopolitics as diagnostic and analytic on religion and to foreground the Black flesh, so as to adumbrate a mode of Black study which offers otherwise possibility to Foucault.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the author’s anthropological research inspired by Foucault’s genealogy of confession. Foucault argues that confession, developed by Christianity, became one of the West's most highly valued techniques for producing truth. Following this statement, the author decided to investigate the practices of confession among the culture of The Tzotzlil - indigenous Maya people of the central highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. The author has conducted ethnographic interviews with both Christian and traditional Maya families. The aim of the investigation was to verify how people with the same ethnic core but professing different religions perceive the role of confession in their lives. The results seem to confirm Foucault’s point of view. People who profess traditional Mayan religion do not have any rituals similar to individual confession but as soon as they convert to Christianity, confession starts to play an important role in their lives.

In his essay, “Pedagogy and Pederasty,” Leo Bersani suggested that Foucault’s oeuvre could be split into two distinct conceptions of power. The first was a conception of panoptic power most clearly articulated in Foucault’s poststructuralist masterpiece, _Birth of the Prison_. On this model, the individual body has no freedom—the body is an instrument of the governmental structure which exercises absolute domination. The second was the conception of power found in Foucault’s histories of asceticism. Bersani was extraordinarily critical of these volumes on ancient asceticism, accusing Foucault of abandoning the theoretical rigor of _Birth of the Prison_ and instead buying into the fantasy that one might be made more free through the ascetic process of intensification of one’s relationship to one’s desires. In this paper, I will explore how Foucault’s two seemingly irreconcilable models (explaining how the self negotiates power) help us to articulate a history of “untouchable” Buddhist asceticism.

This paper examines the impact of economic debt within racial capitalism, using the murder of Alexa Negrón Luciano in Puerto Rico as a case study to explore the intersections of identity, religion, and economic violence. It argues that debt functions as a form of economic violence, particularly against marginalized communities, employing theoretical insights from Michel Foucault and Paul B. Preciado. The study highlights debt as a Foucauldian technology of body production intertwined with colonialism and heteronormative structures, transforming individuals into “indebted subjects” and “debtbodies” within a racial capitalist system. This analysis seeks to expose the violent and religious dimensions of economic debt, challenging traditional views and fostering a critical reevaluation of its societal impacts and ethical implications in the interplay between economy, race, religion, and identity.

            Foucault’s use of critique is valuable for posthumanist scholars who reject established ideas of what it means to be human. Posthumanist scholars suggest that human identity is not as fixed as many would suppose. One’s treatment as human often depends on what one is “doing” rather than one’s “being” human. Similarly, Foucault’s discussions on biopolitics further elaborate on the ambiguity of human identity. Biopolitics reflect biological existence merely in terms of political existence. Due to the recent invention of man and its indefinite historical precedent, Foucault argued that the notion of man could easily cease to exist in the event of a possible critique.[i] I suggest that posthumanism has offered such a critique. Specifically, its cultural concern with technology has emphasized technological reconstructions that are changing what it means to be human.

[i] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 387.

This paper offers a potential solution to the collusion of theological claims about humanity and dehumanizing violence, socially mediated forms of harm that undermine human dignity. Using the work of theologian Edward Schillebeeckx and philosopher Judith Butler, it promotes the force of Christian eschatological hope as a methodological pathway beyond such harm. Schillebeeckx’s thought responds to experiences of contrast and suffering by reimagining humanity in line with the Reign of God and promoting a form of theology that works to defend the humanum, the new humanity announced by God coming into creation. Butler examines the ways a “world” conditions human subjectivity as circumscribed by violence. Their political philosophy promotes a nonviolent force of hope as a practice of worldbuilding. In integrating Schillebeeckx’s and Butler’s reflections on violence and humanity, this paper challenges theology to implement the force of hope to actively dismantle forms of dehumanizing violence through generating new worlds.

This presentation argues that political theology clarifies the problem of populist conflict, and it offers resources that can help us address it. I will focus my reflections on Justice and Love by Mary Zournazi and Rowan Williams (2021). Zournazi and Williams present a compelling case for the view that religion is a force for peace. In my reading, however, they underestimate the role of religious traditions in encouraging violence, and they overstate the value of civility. In response, I will argue that political theology can incorporate the commitment to political conflict described by feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, and Joan Wallach Scott. In my view, medieval negative theology models a politics that is capacious enough to incorporate connection and conflict, sympathy and refusal, appreciation and anger.

Two methodologies dominate queer theologies: an apologetic hermeneutics that seeks to normalize queer people, and a paranoid hermeneutics that seeks to upend systems of determining and validating what is normal. The apologetic approach fails to dismantle insider-outsider systems of recognition; it merely redraws the borders. The paranoid approach reduces the ethical value of queerness to an antisocial ascetic ideal; it thus eclipses the pleasures of queer worldmaking. This paper describes an alternative methodology that I call (with apologies to José Esteban Muñoz) reparative-disidentification. Two recent texts exemplify this approach: Lamya H’s Hijab Butch Blues and Ashon Crawley’s The Lonely Letters. These texts offer what neither the paranoid nor the apologetic mode can achieve: a queer economy of representation that circumvents straight, white, capitalist systems of recognition altogether, clearing ground for otherwise worlds in which queers receive the wahi of their queerness as an invitation to experiment with new relational forms.