Science and Corporeal Religion: A Feminist Materialist Reconsideration of Gender/Sex Diversity in Religiosity
My Ph.D. dissertation is a feminist materialist biopsychosocial account of religious behavior, religious affects, and gender/sex performativity.
My approach builds upon insights from the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, affect theory and affective neuroscience, and social neuroendocrinology, and it is rooted in the foundational insights of feminist materialism, including that cultural and micro-sociological forces are inseparable from biological materiality. The dissertation shows how a helpful way of understanding religious experiences emerges through focusing on the co-construction of biological materiality and cultural meanings. It deploys a gene-culture co-evolutionary explanation of ultrasociality and an understanding of the biology of performativity to argue that religious behavior and temperaments emerge from the enactment and hormonal underpinnings of six affective adaptive desires: the desires for (1) bonding and attachment, (2) communal mythos, (3) deliverance from suffering, (4) purpose, (5) understanding, and (6) reliable leadership. By hypothesizing the patterns of hormonal release and activation associated with ritualized affects—primarily considering oxytocin, testosterone, vasopressin, estrogen, dopamine, and serotonin—the dissertation theorizes four dimensions of religious temperament: (1) nurturant religiosity, (2) ecstatic religiosity, (3) protective/hierarchical religiosity, and (4) antagonistic religiosity. This dissertation rejects determinist frameworks by conceptualizing hormones as chemical messengers that enable the diversity emerging from the imbrication of physical materiality and socio-cultural forces.