‘My dream is that I share the bed with only one man’: Perceptions and practices of premarital sex among Catholic women in Belgium

Drawing on qualitative research with Catholic women who are active in the Church in Belgium, this article sets out to analyse how these women negotiate and manage premarital sexuality. I map their practices, experiences, and strategies, and explore how they make sense of religious and secular norms regarding premarital sexuality. By using two notions as theoretical frameworks, namely religious agency and growth ethics, I argue that combining both can lead to a fertile approach to yielding new insights into the field of religion and sexuality. In so doing, I demonstrate that although not all my interlocutors refrain from sexual relations before marriage, they develop personal sexual ethics, which are distinctly informed by Catholic understandings.

Re-framing women’s agency in #Blessed sex: Intersectional dilemmas for African women’s theologies

The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians has since its inception, affirmed the agency of women in their theological reflection and praxis. In doing so, they have called on their male colleagues to stand in solidarity with them in forging alternative masculinities that renew culture, curb gender-based violence and mitigate HIV infection. This essay argues that there are three assumptions that form the basis of the work of the Circle theologians. Firstly, that women seek to be in egalitarian relationships with men that bring dignity and respect. Secondly, women assert their agency to achieve this goal and in so doing bring healing and wholeness to both groups who are transformed through this process. Thirdly, women assert their agency in solidarity with other women as they build alternative egalitarian communities. Yet, the recent phenomenon of the #Blessed community of young women who seek out ‘blessers’, older men who engage them in transactional sex, in order to fund opulent lifestyles contradicts these assumptions. Their agency embraces non-liberative ideology and practice and chooses not to unseat the dominant ideologies of hetero- and econo-patriarchy.Contribution: The essay concludes that a lack of sustained economic analysis and engaged theological reflection on sexual ethics means the Circle is ill-equipped to respond to the challenge posed by the #Blessed community of young women.

Appeal to Women’s Experience in Ethics: Lessons from Feminism and the Challenge from Postcolonial Critique

Appeal to women’s experience for moral delineation in theological ethics has been perplexed by the issue of cultural diversity and colonialism as raised by postcolonial critique. This paper aims to examine the debates from Third-World feminism and Christian feminism in dealing with difference and solidarity, leading to the call for contextual analysis and related power mappings. Margaret A. Farley’s proposal for sexual ethics in Just Love will then serve as an example to discuss how the search for common morality among cultural diversity may prevent or reinforce colonial agendas and other privileges.

Erotic desire as a woman’s way of knowing the divine

This article examines a Japanese novel written by Arishima Takeo, A Certain Woman (first published in Japanese in 1919), in order to explore women’s ways of knowing, focusing on the body and erotic desire as a locus where the human–God relationship is embodied. This novel shows a way of knowing the Divine beyond language and the sanitized notion of love, describing the life of a modern Japanese Christian woman who refuses both Japanese colonial woman-hood and Christian (Victorian) sexual ethics. Depicting the divine presence in the protagonist’s promiscuous and stigmatized body, Arishima asks theological questions about the role of eros and violence in the pursuit of God, and seeks radically free God and humans who may go beyond any existing boundaries.

I’m Taking Back My Body (The Female Body in the ‘Purity’ Culture)

This paper aims to analyse the American purity movement by examining how the female body became part of an ideology offered as the most viable solution to moral and cultural crises and how this generated counterreactions from the members of the evangelical community (insiders and outsiders alike) since the evangelical discourse on body with its gender-based expressions produces schematised gender constructions and toxic forms of masculinity and femininity that generate confusion, shame and guilt. The four American writers mentioned here (Dianna Anderson, Bromleigh McCleneghan, Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey) agree that biblical womanhood is a myth; a woman’s body is not what “purity” culture suggests it should be; human sexuality is more than premarital abstinence and a set of rules; sacredness is not the appanage of marital sex. The red thread of all four writings is given by the non-dualistic thinking (rejecting Neoplatonic dichotomous separation between body and spirit) that asserts women’s right to body ownership, a sexual ethics based on consent, mutuality, safety and respect, gender equality and partnership. Anderson, McCleneghan, Evans and Bessey are also among the fiercest contesters of the “purity” movement, an American evangelical movement that reduced purity to its genital dimension and salvation to purification of sexual desire.

Status Distinctions and Sartorial Difference: Slavery, Sexual Ethics, and the Social Logic of Veiling in Islamic Law

This article explores how jurists articulated the distinction between free and enslaved Muslim women through sartorial norms in the formative and early post-formative periods of Islamic law. Drawing on works of fiqh (positive law), tafsīr (Qurʾān commentary) and ḥadīth (Prophetic and non-Prophetic reports), I posit that this distinction attests to the tensions between “proprietary” and “theocentric” sexual ethics, as noted by Hina Azam. Specifically, I track the variant transmissions of a widely-cited report featuring the Caliph ʿUmar (r. 13–23/634–44), and trace how jurists responded to the free-slave binary in their discussion of “modesty zones” (ʿawrāt) and veiling practices. Based on a detailed examination of fiqh sources to the early fifth Islamic century (with some attention to subsequent material), I argue that Islamic modesty norms are best understood in light of the proprietary/theocentric binary, and that the divergence between juristic expectations of free and enslaved women increased in the post-formative period.