ASA 2 A03
Blog 10
"Teaching Justice and Living Peace: Body, Sexuality, and Religious Education in Asian-American Communities" by Boyung Lee
When Lee discusses how, according to patriarchal Confucian values, women are tightly monitored and men are given relative sexual freedom, it really reminded me of Rubin's "Traffic in Women". In Rubin's piece, it is argued that the gift-giving of women as objects (marriage, having children, etc.) serves as a tool of constructing relations among men who act as the benefiting subjects. This idea of relation-making supplements to perhaps why there is so much anxiety around controlling women and their bodies.
Although I don't wan to detract from Lee's discussion, I want to bring up the topic of Korean comfort women. It is an interesting observation: almost very contrary to Confucian values of purity, Korean women were offered as comfort women to US and Japanese soldiers during occupation. I feel that purity is just a guise and it is actually a means of trafficking these bodies. And it makes sense that LGBT individuals threaten that system of patriarchal relation-making.
In a way, I also believe that Asian American faith-based communities also conduct this type of control over their members' bodies. Although this is anecdoctal, I used to attend multi-lingual Asian American church. They emphasized the values maintaining purity to the youth, because their bodies were made to serve God. They also prohibit Christians from romantically engaging with non-Christians and as well LGBTQIA individuals.
This seems to me... one way to maintain control over what thoughts and what communities church members participate in. My question is if there are other religious denominations that exhibit this type of control over their members on the basis of restricting and even treating sexuality as a null curriculum?
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