Table Of ContentExploring Sexuality and Spirituality
At the Interface/ Probing
the Boundaries
Founding Editor
Rob Fisher (Progressive Connexions)
Advisory Board
Peter Bray (University of Auckland)
Robert Butler (Elmhurst College)
Ioana Cartarescu (Independent Scholar)
Seán Moran (Waterford Institute of Technology)
Stephen Morris (Independent Scholar)
John Parry (Lewis & Clark College)
Natalia Kaloh Vid (University of Maribor)
volume 132
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ aipb
Exploring Sexuality and
Spirituality
An Introduction to an Interdisciplinary Field
Edited by
Phil Shining and Nicol Michelle Epple
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustrations: (Front) ‘Yoni Canyon’, photograph taken by Dennis Alan Winters and used with
permission; (Back) ‘Phallic Needle’, photograph taken by Dennis Alan Winters and used with permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shining, Phil, editor. | Epple, Nicol Michelle, editor.
Title: Exploring sexuality and spirituality : an introduction to an
interdisciplinary field / edited by Phil Shining and Nicol Michelle Epple.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill | Rodopi, 2021. | Series: At the
interface / probing the boundaries, 1570-7113 ; volume 132 | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020028860 (print) | LCCN 2020028861 (ebook) |
ISBN 9789004430792 (paperback) | ISBN 9789004437869 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sex–Religious aspects. | Spirituality.
Classification: LCC BL65.S4 E945 2021 (print) | LCC BL65.S4 (ebook) |
DDC 201/.61553–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028860
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020028861
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/b rill- typeface.
issn 1570-7 113
isbn 978-9 0-0 4-4 3079-2 (paperback)
isbn 978-9 0-0 4-4 3786-9 (e- book)
Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
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This book is printed on acid- free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
Contents
Foreword vii
Jon Braddy
Preface xix
Nicol Michelle Epple
List of Figures xx
Introduction to the Sexuality and Spirituality Field of Research 1
Phil Shining
part 1
Natural Instincts
1 Spirituality of the Sexually Charged Landscape 57
Dennis Alan Winters
2 Spirituality and Sexuality in Prehistoric Art 106
Richard Alan Northover
part 2
Religious Rapture
3 A Spirituality of Pleasure: The ‘Thousand- Year’ Intercourse of Śiva and
Śakti 131
John R. Dupuche
4 Experiencing yadaʿ: Holistic Encounters of Spiritual Bliss between
Christian Believer and God 163
Nicol Michelle Epple
part 3
Alternative Ecstasy
5 Oscar Wilde’s Spirituality: The Erotics of Queer Theology 197
Rita Dirks
vi Contents
6 The Holy Rebellious Pussy: New Feminist Demands and Religious
Confrontations 211
Assumpta Sabuco Cantó and Ana Álvarez Borrero
part 4
Taboo Challenges
7 The (In)compatibility between Spirituality and Sexuality: Contemporary
Chinese Case Studies 245
Huai Bao
8 Sex Education and Tantra 269
Pavel Hlavinka
part 5
Limit- Experience Embodiments
9 The Abandoned Self: Excess and Inner Experience in
Sadomasochism 289
Catherine Papadopoullos
10 Embodying ‘The Little Death’ of Orgasm: An Interdisciplinary Research
on Sexual Trance 318
Phil Shining
Index 387
Foreword
Jon Braddy
Early in my formative years, growing up with the heavy burden of bearing
the moniker of being a minister’s son, living in the fish- bowl of our church’s
parsonage whose congregation proudly practiced spiritual warfare and nev-
er doubted the reality of demonic possession, attending public schools where
I read the works of Oscar Wilde while sternly forbidden to suggest the author
harbored homo- erotic perspectives, in an area where those schools had no
qualms to invite speakers who warned the impressionable students assembled
of Satan’s rampant evil of stealing souls through the use of subtle tactics such
as backward- masking embedded within rock-a nd- roll albums and the harmful
lure caused by pornography, in a municipality where law enforcement serious-
ly investigated claims of secret covens of devil worshipers whose bloody rituals
sacrificed livestock of local farmers, in a place where civic leaders debated with
sincerity that their town was the buckle of the proverbial Bible Belt, in an area
of the deeply conservative and religious haven of the American South, I began
exploring and forming my initial understanding of sexuality and spirituality.
Friends and schoolmates seemed to navigate this turbulent exploration
of sexuality and spirituality with greater ease then myself. Other preachers’
sons gained reputations of being studs, deflowering their church’s youthful
virgins— often becoming religious youth leaders and spending a couple of
weeks of the summer attending church camp savoring the fruits of the flesh.
My sister, whose lesbian tendencies were clearly a result of demonic posses-
sion acquired while serving in the US Army, was exorcised while she being sur-
rounded by a legion of spiritual warriors engaged in a five-h our long prayer
battle; the result was a decisive win, she is now appropriately celibate. Rock-
and- roll is less popular in my hometown, the mournful lyrics of divorce and
‘Jesus, Take the Wheel’1 moments expressed in American country music is the
preferred genre. The warning caused by pornography was real, the example
of the local preacher of a large and prosperous congregation still echoes; the
pastor was immediately fired when his secretary noticed questionable images
downloaded to the church- office’s computer. The fbi never found evidence of
devil worshipers in the area, but did arrest and sentence to federal prison our
1 Carrie Underwood, ‘Jesus, Take the Wheel’, Some Hearts. Written by Brett James, Hillary
Linsey and Gordie Sampson (Arista Records, 2005).
viii Foreword
town sheriff and his deputy for violating the civil rights of prisoners and in-
timidating witnesses, also for mutilating sheep belonging to a local judge. The
debate about the actual location of the Bible Belt’s buckle continues; however,
there is no debate that my hometown has one of the highest teen pregnancy
rates in the nation, and therefore one of the nation’s highest school dropout
rates. Experiencing both worlds simultaneously, the worlds of my own explora-
tions of spirituality and sexuality, led me to one conclusion: escape that milieu.
My flight was not motivated due to witnessing the hypocrisy surrounding
me, far from it. In my belief, those that had fallen did so because their faith
was lacking; they simply did not have the strength and fortitude to resist temp-
tation. I was fleeing from a much more frightening and sinister realization, a
dawning comprehension that I was a homosexual. I say homosexual because
it was the word uttered by polite company; the signifier carried with it all the
weight of a medical discourse and the symptoms of the mentally ill associated
with its usage. I actually preferred usage of the term homosexuality. Before
the age of the Internet where one could quickly perform a Google search and
find a universe of definitions and perspectives, the only sources of information
available to me were the school’s and town’s libraries. The school’s resource
center had nothing on the subject and the town library only contained a set
of— donated— Catholic encyclopedias published from the 1960s. Reading
the official church’s entry on the subject of homosexuality dated from that
decade, evoked a mixture of sorrow, guilt, and horror. Other signifiers were
even more loaded with negative connotations; sodomite and sinner used
among the religious; faggot, queer, sissy boy used by everyone else. I never
knew which moniker frightened me more. Regardless, I consciously engaged
in stylistic performances— both in the selection of artifacts and through cor-
poreal displays— and repeated acts intended to cover any leakage of escaped
gendered transgression. Judith Butler clearly identified such behaviors when
she declared, ‘Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the
play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part
in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the
confines of already existing directives.’2
Of course, my real conflict was less concerned about hearing the word and
all the connotative weight it conveyed, but rather about all the spiritual con-
demnation and public damnation inherent in the individual associated with
the meaning of homosexuality. The sodomite is destined for hell, he is an
2 Judith Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and
Feminist Theory’, Theatre Journal, 40.4 (1988): 526.
Foreword ix
abomination to God, and he must endure the pity and scorn of others. The
faggot lurks around men’s public restrooms, he waits at bus stations luring the
recently released prison inmate, he seduces confused or emotionally vulnera-
ble youth; and when he is arrested by the police, when he is beaten and robbed
by criminals or when he is sent to the mental ward and branded a sexual pred-
ator, his is deserving. Or he can be celibate, never acting upon his sinful and
loathsome desires; also, never experiencing open companionship or public
expressions of affection; he is alone in his secret suffering and sorrow. My in-
ternal conflict was real. Why was this both my soul’s fate and my life’s destiny?
Something, even to my immature spirit and young mind, appeared emotional-
ly and logically incongruent; I felt, in the words of queer theorist Lee Edelman,
an opposition to the ‘logic of oppositionality’.3 Queer theory is not, ‘a matter
of either being or becoming, but rather of embodying, within the historical
moment that imposes upon us such a figural association, the unsymbolizable
remainder or the real produced by the order of meaning as the token of what
that order is necessarily barred from being able to signifiy’.4 So experiencing
oppositionality, I fled to the farthest, safest and most liberated place available
to continue my personal explorations of sexuality and spirituality— college.
Higher education provided an excellent space to explore sexuality. Spiritual
exploration, however, quickly waned. I arrived in Chicago and delved into my
studies and soon discovered that, like most metropolitan centers, there was also
a large, open and thriving gay community. My college roommate was truly the
first person who did not condemn homosexuality; for him, it was simply no big
deal. My college professors did not treat homosexuality with disdain or as the
equivalent to child molesters or the mentally ill. The mayor of Chicago openly
celebrated Gay Pride, he attended the gay community’s parades and festivals,
lavishing resources to beautify and enhance safety in the Halstead neighbor-
hood. Bill Clinton was elected president of the United States and removed the
prohibition against gay men and women serving in the military. The Internet
was expanding, ushering forth new businesses and opening vast avenues of
information. Oppressive fear was quickly replaced with unrestrained curiosity
and the freedom to explore my sexuality became fun, joyous and liberating;
I ‘exuberantly discarded’5 the self. And this discarding had another unexpected
consequence; my spirituality, which previously seemed at odds with my sex-
uality, deepened its roots, sprung forth new growth, blossomed and yielded
3 Lee Edelman, ‘The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive’.
Narrative 6.1 (1998): 27.
4 Ibid.
5 Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ October 43 (Winter, 1987): 218.
