Overkill
Why Excess and Conflict are both Sexy and Sacred
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v1i3.277Keywords:
gender and religionAbstract
In popular understandings, both excess and conflict are understood as compelling, even ‘sexy’. Drawing from the perspectives of feminist theory, history, and theology, I consider the ways that patriarchal cultures eroticize possession, domination, and taboo violation, leading to this popular apprehension. I critique some of the ways that patriarchal conceptions of sex and God, both founded in a gendered conception of power as domination, intersect to influence significantly and foment harms including environmental devastation.
References
Allen, P.G. 1986 The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press).
Baker, M. 1982 Nam: The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New York: William Morrow).
Barash, D.P. 2002 ‘Evolution, Males, and Violence’, The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 24): B7.
Berry, T. 2004 ‘Into the Future’, in Gottlieb 2004: 492-504.
Campbell, J., with B. Moyers 1988 The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday).
Caputi, J. 1987 The Age of Sex Crime (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press).
Gossips, Gorgons, and Crones: The Fates of the Earth (Santa Fe: Bear & Co.).
a Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power and Popular Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press/Popular Press).
b ‘The Gods We Worship: Sexual Murder as Religious Sacrifice’, in Caputi 2004a: 182-208.
c ‘The Pornography of Everyday Life’, in Caputi 2004a: 74-118.
d ‘The Naked Goddess: Pornography, Female Potency, and the Sacred’, in Caputi 2004a: 370-86.
‘Sexuality and Green Consciousness’, in B.R. Taylor (ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (New York: Thoemmes Continuum): 1519-23.
Carson, R. 1998 ‘Preface to Animal Machines [1964]’, in L. Lear (ed.), Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (Boston: Beacon Press): 194-96.
Chevalier, J., and A. Gheerbrant 1994 The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols (New York: Penguin Books).
Chodorow, N. 1978 The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Cooper, R.T. 2003 ‘General Casts War in Religious Terms’, Los Angeles Times, 16 October. www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1016-01.htm (accessed 6 September 2006).
Cortez, J. 1984 ‘Tell Me’, in Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press): 106-109.
Cronon, W. 1983 Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang).
Daly, M. 1973 Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press).
Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press).
Daly, M., with J. Caputi 1987 Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Boston: Beacon Press).
Danner, M. 2004 Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books).
de Beauvoir, S. 1993 [1953] The Second Sex (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
Dijkstra, B. 1996 Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
Doyle, L. 2000 The Surrendered Wife: A Practical Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion, and Peace with a Man (New York: Simon & Schuster).
Dworkin, A. 1987 Intercourse (New York: The Free Press).
Dworkin, A., and C. MacKinnon 1988 Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis: Organizing Against Pornography).
Gilligan, J. 1996 Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage Books).
Gottlieb, R.S. (ed.) 2004 This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2nd edn).
Hanh, T.N. 1988 The Heart of Understanding (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press).
Hillman, J. 1995 Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses (New York: Currency Doubleday).
A Terrible Love of War (New York: Penguin).
Johnston, B. 1995 The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway (New York: Harper–Perennial).
Kolodny, A. 1975 The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
LaPerla, R. 2000 ‘The Latest Look: Unforgiving’, The New York Times, 13 November.
Lerner, G. 1986 The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press).
MacKinnon, C.A. 1983 ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward a Feminist Jurisprudence’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8.4: 635-58. doi:10.1086/494000
Marcus, M.I. 1996 ‘Sex and the Politics of Female Adornment in Pre-achaemenid Iran (1000–800 B.C.E)’, in N.B. Kampen (ed.), Sexuality in Ancient Art: Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 41-54.
Merchant, C. 1980 The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row).
Millett, K. 1970 Sexual Politics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday).
Noble, D.F. 1999 The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Penguin Books).
Ruether, R.R. 2004 ‘Ecofeminism: Symbolic and Social Connections of the Oppression of Women and the Domination of Nature’, in Gottlieb 2004: 388-99.
Sanday, P.R. 1997 ‘The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study’, in LL. O’Toole and J.R. Schiffman (eds.), Gender Violence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: New York University Press): 52-66.
Seagar, J. 1993 Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis (New York: Routledge).
Sheehy, G. 1973 Hustling (New York: Dell).
Sjöö, M., and B. Mor 1991 The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2nd edn).
Smiley, J. 1991 A Thousand Acres (New York: Fawcett Columbine).
Smith, A. 2005 Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Boston: South End Press).
Walljasper, J., and J. Spayde 2001 ‘Thomas Berry’, in Visionaries: People and Ideas to Change Your Life (Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers): 5-9.
Williams, P. 1995 The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
