Blasphemous Art?

This book explores the critical and transformative potential of arts and popular culture for constructions of religion, gender and sexuality. Doing so, it deploys and develops the notion of blasphemous art, honouring and building on the work of Anne-Marie Korte. Deliberately articulated with a question mark, Blasphemous Art? raises questions about the spaces, methods and resources available to individuals and communities at the gendered, sexual and racialized margins of society to tell their stories, claim their bodies and perform symbolic and sacred meaning, and it analyses the productive effects ? both aesthetically, politically and theoretically ? of such provocative work. The book focuses on a wide range of artistic and cultural expressions, featuring case studies from across Europe, South Africa, Israel and the United States.  Drawing on feminist, queer and postcolonial perspectives, the book reveals the critical, constructive and imaginative potential of the creative arts (broadly defined) and popular culture in its complex and diverse representation of, and engagement with, religious life, belief, text, ritual and practice.

'Anne-Marie Korte?s corpus of work has been a wonderful and welcome addition to the academic world: challenging, provoking, and reorienting normative scholarly categories. Chapters in this volume build on her work to show how categories of gender and sexuality can challenge our understanding of religion by narrowing in on the moments of blasphemy and transgression, places where the categories come unhinged and show us the fluid nature of our social lives'.

S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate, Hamilton College, USA

'This imaginative volume is not only a fitting tribute to Anne-Marie Korte?s contribution to the field but is an exciting collection that tracks the dynamic, fun, and confronting interactions between religion, gender, and sexuality, and creative popular culture. From stand-up comedy, the Barbie movie, menopausal bodies, black HIV queer poetry, LGBTQI+ writing practices, storytelling, and graphic novels, to TV, and performance, the authors challenge understandings of blasphemy and highlight the capacity of art to transform and reimagine constructions of religion, gender, and sexuality'.

Dawn Llewellyn, University of Chester, UK

'Smashed statues of Asherah, menopause, skits and stand-up, Ukrainian war art (icons on ammunition boxes), witches, the Israeli docuseries The Holy Closet, ex-Muslim identities, Barbie, black and Latinx ballroom, "heretical" Jesuses in queer black south African poetry ? and so much more. Moving between the theatre and the hospital, the museum and "the news", these punchy, astute studies perform and analyse the decomposition and recomposition of the sacred and the profane (and the normative and the inexpressible/ineffable, that which cannot be "effed", as Sam Beckett said). The contributors deftly show how, though blasphemy has been in bed (so to speak) with sex for centuries, the positions keep on changing. A vibrant celebration of the work of Anne-Marie Korte and a stand-alone volume in its own right, bursting with boldness and insights on iconoclash and ironic faith'.

Yvonne Sherwood, University of Oslo, Norway