Blasphemous Art? Religion, Gender and Sexuality in Arts and Popular Culture

In Blasphemous Art? Religion, Gender and Sexuality in Arts and Popular Culture, editors Adriaan van Klinken, Nella van den Brandt, and Mariecke van den Berg compile a collection of essays that seek to interrogate the notion of blasphemous art. The book explores a diverse range of artistic disciplines, geographic locations, and religious contexts; however, the work is united though each author’s analysis of “perceived blasphemic or otherwise potentially offensive works of art and popular culture featuring religion, gender and sexuality” (2). The notions of perceived blasphemy and potential offensiveness are important to highlight as they hint at the major questions of the book: What are the politics of blasphemy in a Western, secularized society? Moreover, is blasphemy an inherent quality embedded in a work, or is it an accusation or label placed upon a work when someone is offended on behalf of their religious identity? These are complicated questions that the authors in this volume tackle—some more convincingly than others.Blasphemous Art is divided into three sections to examine three key themes: bodies, stories, and performances. The chapters within each section explore different confrontations of religion, gender, and sexuality with a particular focus on marginalized individuals or groups. The aim of Blasphemous Art is threefold: first, to interrogate and complexify the contemporary Western notion of blasphemy in relation to the arts; second, to analyze the dynamic and provocative interactions that come from religion, gender, and sexuality in works of art; and third, to advocate for blasphemous art and its imaginative and representative power for marginalized peoples.Van Klinken, van den Brandt, and van den Berg begin Blasphemous Art with an introduction that takes on the essential task of defining blasphemy. Quoting Yvonne Sherwood, the editors explain that in a Western secular society no longer explicitly or dominantly controlled by a singular religion, “blasphemy accusations [have] shifted over time from being seen as offending God or institutions representing God, to offending the feelings of believers” (2). Sherwood suggests that in a secular context, blasphemy is a deeply subjective term currently indebted to feeling rather than fact.Due to this subjectivity, the editors decided “to stretch the definition of blasphemy somewhat” (4). They state that “this stretching perhaps bears the risk of ‘polluting’ the clarity of the notion of blasphemy. On the other hand, it enables us to look also for more implicit assumptions about how to understand arts and cultural products and where to look for the offensive, subversive, and transgressive” (4). As this quote suggests, the editors of Blasphemous Art chose to approach blasphemy less from the traditional sense (where it is seen as an act or utterance that denounces, disrespects, or lacks reverence towards a deity or something sacred) and more as synonymous with the transgressive. As a result, their definition of blasphemous art becomes clearer: artwork that forces interactions between religion (something viewed as sacred) and an othered body (something considered profane) are blasphemous art, and this art allows for experiences of difference to be explored.The book’s first section focuses on blasphemous bodies. The editors describe the body as a continued “site of contestation between conflicting norms, ideals, and values such as those associated with religion versus secularity, liberalism versus conservatism, private versus public, individualism versus community” (12). These chapters focus on bodies that are considered blasphemous because they transgress expectations for white, heteronormative, cis-gendered, and able bodies. In the first chapter, “Do We Need to Talk about My Uterus? Some Thoughts on What Makes for a Blasphemous Menopausal Narrative,” Megan Milota questions why menopausal narratives, specifically personal and un-shameful narratives, are largely absent from contemporary arts and popular culture. Milota articulates that “the menopausal body challenges the sacred and preferred depiction of women as young, fertile, attractive and well behaved” (31), meaning that a menopausal body is blasphemous because it challenges, or profanes, the ideal female body. Shifting her focus to three television programs that depict menopausal bodies, Milota examines these portrayals and describes how they allow for embodied performances of a natural physical process, thus destigmatizing the menopausal experience and offering menopausal viewers a sense of solidarity and mutual understanding. While Milota’s argument on making “shameful” topics visible in arts and popular culture for the sake of destigmatization confirms the power of representation in the arts, this chapter highlights a shortcoming in the editors’ approach to Blasphemous Art. The blasphemous body that Milota discusses aligns with the book’s equation of blasphemy with transgression; however, the chapter itself fails to relate directly to religion, be it religious assessments of menopausal bodies or television programs that feature religion in a meaningful way.The authors of the two subsequent chapters in this section also examine artwork with bodies that subvert Western, white, heteropatriarchal expectations—van Klinken focuses on a black Jesus that is HIV positive, while van den Berg analyzes a promiscuous woman accused of witchcraft by fifteenth-century Dutch Calvinists. These characters are perceived as blasphemous not just in their transgressive physical bodies but also through their engagement with religious themes. These chapters excel in their discussions of blasphemous bodies not simply because they rely on the book’s unlimited definition of blasphemy or transgression but because they deepen their blasphemy discourses by situating them within religious narratives. Van Klinken and van den Berg achieve the book’s ambition of analyzing the dynamic and imaginative ways art can engage religion, gender, and sexuality and, in doing so, present compelling case studies for understanding the potential for generative artistic dialogue in such works.The chapters in the “Stories” section of the book focus on the deployment of narrative and storytelling techniques to help characterize experiences between individuals or communities and the religious institutions to which they belong or resist. Blasphemy, in these instances, is thus understood as the utilization of religious ideas or symbols as tools of resistance against hegemonic orders. Heleen Zordrager’s “Resisting Dehumanization: A Feminist Reading of Iconoclashes in Ukrainian War Art,” Orit Avishai’s “Mendacity as Blasphemy: Storytelling and the Making of Religious/LGBTQ+ Jewish Identities,” and van den Brandt’s “(Losing) Faith, Intimacy and the Gendered Religion-Race-Secularity Nexus in Stories by Women of Islamic Backgrounds,” all focus on the narrativized identities of marginalized peoples and how they embody resistance. The positioning of religion in these journeys of resistance generates compelling discussions on how religion can either limit or embolden the pursuit of freedom. Zordrager’s essay is especially effective, as the author analyzes how Ukrainian artists have resisted Russian occupation and violence in the ongoing war against Ukraine by painting Orthodox icons on Russian ammunition boxes. Orthodox traditions would classify such works as blasphemous because they expose the icons to war and violence, but by making Russians confront their icons when attacking their Ukrainian victims, these works also protest the “militarized Orthodoxy that glorifies war as a way of salvation” (94). In this case, blasphemous art is holding a mirror to the militarized and weaponized Orthodoxy that is empowering Russia’s war on Ukraine and promoting unethical and even unbiblical actions. The narrative of militarized Russian Orthodoxy is problematized through blasphemous art, thus allowing for an emboldened narrative of Ukrainian resistance.The final section of Blasphemous Art focuses on performances. The editors explain that “the chapters in this part of the book present case studies of cultural productions where the intersections of religion, gender and sexuality . . . are explicitly thematized, with normative scripts being criticized, creatively reimagined and at times radically transgressed” (14). Alternatively, this section of the book aims to analyze how art, specifically performed works, imagines alternative and more accepting realities for marginalized peoples. These chapters include Megan Robertson’s “‘I’m just a vessel’: Sex and the Sacred in South African Cape Flats Theatre,” Lieke L. Schrijvers’s “‘Your God made me this way’: Religion, Race and Queer Love in the Drama Series Pose,” Lucy Spoliar’s “‘The only Orthodox Jewish woman in British stand-up comedy’: Marginality, Relatability and Popular Culture in Rachel Creeger’s Pray It Forward!,” and Margaretha A. van Es’s “This Barbie can walk on water! Longing for a Feminist Messiah in the Cinema.” This final essay excels in its discussions of blasphemy, specifically because it highlights how its respective subject employs religious themes and symbols in a blasphemous way—for example, by imagining Barbie as a female messiah—and then examines what imagined realities these blasphemies then generate. While a doll being interpreted as a messianic figure might be blasphemous, it allows for an imagined matriarchal reality to exist in the film, thus generating valuable discussions on feminism and capitalism.Overall, Blasphemous Art is a useful piece of scholarship for surveying how various contemporary works of art contend with religion, gender, and sexuality. Yet, a concern lies in the way the editors chose to approach the terms “blasphemy” and “blasphemous art.” The editors’ introduction fails to provide a thorough understanding of blasphemy and allows for blasphemy to be synonymous with transgression, subversion, and offense—consequentially decentering or removing the traditional sacred dimension of the term. While the intentions of this open definition are understandable given the inescapable subjectivity of blasphemy in the secular era, the methodological choice of not defining or limiting what blasphemy means while simultaneously choosing to understand blasphemy as tantamount to transgression raises questions about the foundation upon which this book on blasphemous art stands. Can the religious origins of the term “blasphemy” be stripped from it, and can blasphemy simply mean art that transgresses or challenges the status quo? Does transgressive or subversive fully encapsulate the meaning of blasphemy?While Blasphemous Art contains plenty of valuable insights and scholarship, it would have been improved by a more nuanced understanding of blasphemy and how it relates to the Western, contemporary contexts of the artworks the book explores. This is not to say that the book is not compelling. Blasphemous Art highlights how artists might use religion to work with or against religious institutions in reconsidering how people might relate to religion in the contexts of gender and sexuality. Additionally, many chapters offer insightful perspectives on religious art that engages with gender and sexuality and succeed in the book’s stated objective of studying how these types of art may generate important discussions and debates on the interactions between religion and blasphemous themes.

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