RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION AND THE BODY

In recent years feminist scholarship has increasingly focused on the importance of the body and its representations in virtually every social, cultural, and intellectual context. Many have argued that because women are more closely identified with their bodies than men are, they have access to privileged and different kinds of knowledge. In this landmark new book, Paula Cooey offers a new perspective on the significance of the body in the context of religious life and practice. Religious Imagination and the Body addresses such vital concerns as the role of the body in religious experience, the impact of gender or sexual difference on religious experience and its authority, and the viability of women’s religious experience as an authoritative alternative to male-centered and male-dominated culture. Cooey argues an innovative position that is both critical and constructive, thus contributing to the ongoing debates in contemporary theory of religion, philosophical theology, and feminist theory. Building on the pathbreaking work of Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain, Cooey looks at a wide range of evidence, from the Argentine prison narrative of Alicia Partnoy, to the novels of Toni Morrison and the paintings of Frida Kahlo. Using current social theory and critique, cognitive psychology, contemporary fiction and art, and women’s accounts of religious experience, Cooey relates the reality of sentience to the social construction of reality. Analyzing the female body as a metaphor for alternative knowledge, Cooey considers the significance of physical pain and pleasure to the religious imagination, and the relations between sentience, sensuality, and female subjectivity. This important studybrings forward a sophisticated new understanding of the religious importance of the body, at the same time laying the foundations of a feminist theory of religion.