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Papers by Sophie Bjork-James
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Mar 23, 2020
Video is not available. Abstract: This talk places the contemporary Alt-Right within a longer his... more Video is not available. Abstract: This talk places the contemporary Alt-Right within a longer history of racist right ideas and organizing. Beginning with the formation of the KKK at the close of the Civil War, I show how the racist right often sees a surge in activity and membership in response to extensions of Civil Rights for people of color. I draw form over ten years of research on the racist right to discuss the emergence of the white nationalist movement in the 1990s and its expansion into the Alt-Right in the last few years. I also discuss the role of new media in the proliferation of this movement. About the Lecturer: Sophie Bjork-James has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is finalizing a book manuscript on race and evangelical politics in the United States. Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, and The Ethnic Studies Review...
Social science & medicine, Apr 1, 2024
Journal of Contemporary Religion
Women's Studies International Forum
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review
Australian Feminist Studies, 2021
This article introduces the special issue on Climate Change, Gender, and Authoritarianism: Entang... more This article introduces the special issue on Climate Change, Gender, and Authoritarianism: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right. Starting from the hypothesis that anti-feminism functions as a meta language in the far-right’s fight against liberal democracy as well as social and environmental justice, this special issue explores how anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism merge and inform one another in contemporary far-right discourses and politics on climate change. Focusing on the connections that form the tissue of far-right imaginaries of sex, gender, race, and the nation in the context of the simultaneous dismissal and mobilisation of ecological issues, a broad picture of the state of research on the entanglement of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism in the far-right will be laid out. In doing so, this special issue aims at providing us with a much-needed insight into the gendered and racialised political ecology of the contemporary far-right.
Australian Feminist Studies, 2022
In this interview, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe discusses with Sophie Bjork-James and Josef... more In this interview, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe discusses with Sophie Bjork-James and Josef Barla: the issue of gender inequality in the natural sciences; the toxic entanglement of right-wing extremism, sexism and anti-science rhetoric in discourses on climate change; the far-reaching institutional and social consequences of the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science research and advocacy; as well as the politics of ignorance and promising ways to rebuild trust in shared values and a shared world in the face of multiple planetary crises and challenges from climate change to biodiversity loss to the rise of far-right extremism.
Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy, 2021
Feminist Anthropology, 2020
This article asks how an anti-racist, feminist anthropology can help us understand the expansion ... more This article asks how an anti-racist, feminist anthropology can help us understand the expansion of the radical right, with a focus on the online white nationalist movement. It demonstrates how homophobia and anti-feminism are two of many pathways into the online white nationalist movement. In effect, white nationalists work through online venues to racialize homophobia and anti-feminism. They articulate a view of white racialization where gender and sexuality are central to ideas about biological and cultural superiority. Through tracing the linkages between gender, sexuality, and race in different ideations of the white nationalist movement, this article shows a continuity of these core ideas to white nationalism across different manifestations of the movement, even as the expression of them has changed. An aim of this article is to demonstrate the ways an anti-racist, feminist anthropology provides tools to understand how concerns about gender animate this authoritarian movement. Just before committing a massacre at two New Zealand mosques in March 2019, Brenton Tarrant posted on the infamous 8chan imageboard forum /pol/ (short for "Politically Incorrect"), saying he was going to carry out an "attack against the invaders." He also shared a link to his planned video livestream, ensuring he would have an audience. Less than twenty-four hours later, with Brenton Tarrant in police custody and first responders still recovering bodies, 8chan was celebrating the murders. A popular post discussing Tarrant's manifesto articulated a sexualized racial identity central to the white nationalist ideology that both inspired the massacre and provided a transnational public to celebrate it. The posters discussed the concept of
Ethnos, 2020
In this paper, I use insights from extensive ethnographic research with evangelicals in Colorado ... more In this paper, I use insights from extensive ethnographic research with evangelicals in Colorado Springs, Colorado to investigate how competing ethical understandings of time and the future underpi...
Anthropology News, 2017
The rise of a visible white nationalist movement and the precipitous rise in publicly reported ha... more The rise of a visible white nationalist movement and the precipitous rise in publicly reported hate crimes unsettled racial politics on both the left and right, surprising more than a few academics.How do we account for this changed racial landscape? What does the rise of white nationalism now suggest about racial politics in the US today?
Explorations in Ethnic Studies, 2006
It is not just that the limits of our language limit our thoughts; the world we find ourselves in... more It is not just that the limits of our language limit our thoughts; the world we find ourselves in is one we have helped to create, and this places constraints upon how we think the world anew.
American Anthropologist, 2018
In this article, I examine how US evangelical opposition to LGBT rights stems from a unique under... more In this article, I examine how US evangelical opposition to LGBT rights stems from a unique understanding of sexuality and the person. As my respondents explained to me in over sixteen months of field research, evangelical rejection of LGBT individuals and practices is rooted not simply in prejudice but also in a culturally specific notion of personhood that requires Christian bodies to orient themselves to the divine. In evangelical Christianity, the body, along with its capacity to feel and communicate, is understood as a porous vessel receptive to communication with God. In contrast to a dominant idea that sexual orientations shape individual identities, sexuality within this religious world instead facilitates the movement of moral forces across individual bodies and geographic scales. Sexual desires and sexual acts are broadly understood in evangelical cosmology as communicative mediums for supernatural forces. This understanding of sexuality as a central component of moral agency shapes widespread practices of ostracism of people who identify as LGBT within evangelicalism and often leads to anti-LGBT political positions. Claiming an LGBT identity is seen as making one a distinct kind of person incommensurate with evangelical porosity. [evangelical, sexuality, embodiment, United States] RESUMEN En este artículo, examino cómo la oposición evangélica en Estados Unidos a los derechos de la comunidad LGBT proviene de un entendimientoúnico de la sexualidad y la persona. Como mis respondedores me explicaron en más de dieciséis meses de investigación de campo, el rechazo evangélico a individuos y prácticas LGTB está enraizado no simplemente en prejuicios sino también en una noción culturalmente específica de la condición de persona que requiere que los cuerpos cristianos se orienten en sí mismos hacia lo divino. En la cristiandad evangélica, el cuerpo, junto con su capacidad de sentir y comunicarse, se entiende como un recipiente poroso receptivo de comunicación con Dios. En contraste a una idea dominante que las orientaciones sexuales dan forma a las identidades individuales, la sexualidad dentro del mundo religioso, en cambio facilita el movimiento de fuerzas morales a través de cuerpos individuales y escalas geográficas. Los deseos sexuales y los actos sexuales son ampliamente entendidos en la cosmología evangélica como medios comunicativos para las fuerzas sobrenaturales. Este entendimiento de la sexualidad como un componente central de la agencia moral le da forma a las prácticas extendidas de ostracismo de las personas quienes se identifican como LGBT dentro del evangelicalismo y a menudo lleva a posiciones políticas anti-LGBT. Reivindicar una identidad LGBT se ve como el hacer un tipo distinto de persona inconmensurable con la porosidad evangélica. [evangélica, sexualidad, corporeización, Estados Unidos] I met Virginia Simmonds in the lobby of the evangelical North End Church one Sunday morning in 2010 in
Journal of Religion and Violence, 2019
This paper uses anti-LGBTQ bias within evangelical Christianity as a case study to explore how na... more This paper uses anti-LGBTQ bias within evangelical Christianity as a case study to explore how nationalist movements justify prejudicial positions through framing privileged groups as victims. Since Anita Bryant’s late 1970s crusade against what was dubbed the “homosexual agenda,” white evangelicals have led a national movement opposing LGBTQ rights in the United States. Through a commitment to ensuring sexual minorities are excluded from civil rights protections, white evangelicals have contributed to a cultural and legal landscape conducive to anti-LGBTQ structural violence. This opposition is most often understood as rooted in love, and not in bias or hate, as demonstrated during long-term ethnographic research among white evangelical churches in Colorado Springs. Engaging with theories of morality and nationalism, this article argues that most biased political movements understand their motivation as defending a moral order and not perpetuating bias. In this way they can justify...
Australian Feminist Studies, 2022
This article introduces the special issue on Climate Change, Gender, and Authoritarianism: Entang... more This article introduces the special issue on Climate Change, Gender, and
Authoritarianism: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right. Starting from the hypothesis that anti-feminism functions as a meta language in the far-right’s fight against liberal democracy as well as social and environmental justice, this special issue explores how anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism merge and inform one another in contemporary far-right discourses and politics on climate change. Focusing on the connections that form the tissue of far-right imaginaries of sex, gender, race, and the nation in the context of the simultaneous dismissal and mobilisation of ecological issues, a
broad picture of the state of research on the entanglement of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism in the far-right will be laid out. In doing so, this special issue aims at providing us with a much-needed insight into the gendered and racialised political ecology of the contemporary far-right.
Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Mar 23, 2020
Video is not available. Abstract: This talk places the contemporary Alt-Right within a longer his... more Video is not available. Abstract: This talk places the contemporary Alt-Right within a longer history of racist right ideas and organizing. Beginning with the formation of the KKK at the close of the Civil War, I show how the racist right often sees a surge in activity and membership in response to extensions of Civil Rights for people of color. I draw form over ten years of research on the racist right to discuss the emergence of the white nationalist movement in the 1990s and its expansion into the Alt-Right in the last few years. I also discuss the role of new media in the proliferation of this movement. About the Lecturer: Sophie Bjork-James has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is finalizing a book manuscript on race and evangelical politics in the United States. Her work has appeared in American Anthropologist, Oxford Bibliographies, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, and The Ethnic Studies Review...
Social science & medicine, Apr 1, 2024
Journal of Contemporary Religion
Women's Studies International Forum
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review
Australian Feminist Studies, 2021
This article introduces the special issue on Climate Change, Gender, and Authoritarianism: Entang... more This article introduces the special issue on Climate Change, Gender, and Authoritarianism: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right. Starting from the hypothesis that anti-feminism functions as a meta language in the far-right’s fight against liberal democracy as well as social and environmental justice, this special issue explores how anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism merge and inform one another in contemporary far-right discourses and politics on climate change. Focusing on the connections that form the tissue of far-right imaginaries of sex, gender, race, and the nation in the context of the simultaneous dismissal and mobilisation of ecological issues, a broad picture of the state of research on the entanglement of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism in the far-right will be laid out. In doing so, this special issue aims at providing us with a much-needed insight into the gendered and racialised political ecology of the contemporary far-right.
Australian Feminist Studies, 2022
In this interview, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe discusses with Sophie Bjork-James and Josef... more In this interview, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe discusses with Sophie Bjork-James and Josef Barla: the issue of gender inequality in the natural sciences; the toxic entanglement of right-wing extremism, sexism and anti-science rhetoric in discourses on climate change; the far-reaching institutional and social consequences of the Trump administration’s attacks on climate science research and advocacy; as well as the politics of ignorance and promising ways to rebuild trust in shared values and a shared world in the face of multiple planetary crises and challenges from climate change to biodiversity loss to the rise of far-right extremism.
Exposing the Right and Fighting for Democracy, 2021
Feminist Anthropology, 2020
This article asks how an anti-racist, feminist anthropology can help us understand the expansion ... more This article asks how an anti-racist, feminist anthropology can help us understand the expansion of the radical right, with a focus on the online white nationalist movement. It demonstrates how homophobia and anti-feminism are two of many pathways into the online white nationalist movement. In effect, white nationalists work through online venues to racialize homophobia and anti-feminism. They articulate a view of white racialization where gender and sexuality are central to ideas about biological and cultural superiority. Through tracing the linkages between gender, sexuality, and race in different ideations of the white nationalist movement, this article shows a continuity of these core ideas to white nationalism across different manifestations of the movement, even as the expression of them has changed. An aim of this article is to demonstrate the ways an anti-racist, feminist anthropology provides tools to understand how concerns about gender animate this authoritarian movement. Just before committing a massacre at two New Zealand mosques in March 2019, Brenton Tarrant posted on the infamous 8chan imageboard forum /pol/ (short for "Politically Incorrect"), saying he was going to carry out an "attack against the invaders." He also shared a link to his planned video livestream, ensuring he would have an audience. Less than twenty-four hours later, with Brenton Tarrant in police custody and first responders still recovering bodies, 8chan was celebrating the murders. A popular post discussing Tarrant's manifesto articulated a sexualized racial identity central to the white nationalist ideology that both inspired the massacre and provided a transnational public to celebrate it. The posters discussed the concept of
Ethnos, 2020
In this paper, I use insights from extensive ethnographic research with evangelicals in Colorado ... more In this paper, I use insights from extensive ethnographic research with evangelicals in Colorado Springs, Colorado to investigate how competing ethical understandings of time and the future underpi...
Anthropology News, 2017
The rise of a visible white nationalist movement and the precipitous rise in publicly reported ha... more The rise of a visible white nationalist movement and the precipitous rise in publicly reported hate crimes unsettled racial politics on both the left and right, surprising more than a few academics.How do we account for this changed racial landscape? What does the rise of white nationalism now suggest about racial politics in the US today?
Explorations in Ethnic Studies, 2006
It is not just that the limits of our language limit our thoughts; the world we find ourselves in... more It is not just that the limits of our language limit our thoughts; the world we find ourselves in is one we have helped to create, and this places constraints upon how we think the world anew.
American Anthropologist, 2018
In this article, I examine how US evangelical opposition to LGBT rights stems from a unique under... more In this article, I examine how US evangelical opposition to LGBT rights stems from a unique understanding of sexuality and the person. As my respondents explained to me in over sixteen months of field research, evangelical rejection of LGBT individuals and practices is rooted not simply in prejudice but also in a culturally specific notion of personhood that requires Christian bodies to orient themselves to the divine. In evangelical Christianity, the body, along with its capacity to feel and communicate, is understood as a porous vessel receptive to communication with God. In contrast to a dominant idea that sexual orientations shape individual identities, sexuality within this religious world instead facilitates the movement of moral forces across individual bodies and geographic scales. Sexual desires and sexual acts are broadly understood in evangelical cosmology as communicative mediums for supernatural forces. This understanding of sexuality as a central component of moral agency shapes widespread practices of ostracism of people who identify as LGBT within evangelicalism and often leads to anti-LGBT political positions. Claiming an LGBT identity is seen as making one a distinct kind of person incommensurate with evangelical porosity. [evangelical, sexuality, embodiment, United States] RESUMEN En este artículo, examino cómo la oposición evangélica en Estados Unidos a los derechos de la comunidad LGBT proviene de un entendimientoúnico de la sexualidad y la persona. Como mis respondedores me explicaron en más de dieciséis meses de investigación de campo, el rechazo evangélico a individuos y prácticas LGTB está enraizado no simplemente en prejuicios sino también en una noción culturalmente específica de la condición de persona que requiere que los cuerpos cristianos se orienten en sí mismos hacia lo divino. En la cristiandad evangélica, el cuerpo, junto con su capacidad de sentir y comunicarse, se entiende como un recipiente poroso receptivo de comunicación con Dios. En contraste a una idea dominante que las orientaciones sexuales dan forma a las identidades individuales, la sexualidad dentro del mundo religioso, en cambio facilita el movimiento de fuerzas morales a través de cuerpos individuales y escalas geográficas. Los deseos sexuales y los actos sexuales son ampliamente entendidos en la cosmología evangélica como medios comunicativos para las fuerzas sobrenaturales. Este entendimiento de la sexualidad como un componente central de la agencia moral le da forma a las prácticas extendidas de ostracismo de las personas quienes se identifican como LGBT dentro del evangelicalismo y a menudo lleva a posiciones políticas anti-LGBT. Reivindicar una identidad LGBT se ve como el hacer un tipo distinto de persona inconmensurable con la porosidad evangélica. [evangélica, sexualidad, corporeización, Estados Unidos] I met Virginia Simmonds in the lobby of the evangelical North End Church one Sunday morning in 2010 in
Journal of Religion and Violence, 2019
This paper uses anti-LGBTQ bias within evangelical Christianity as a case study to explore how na... more This paper uses anti-LGBTQ bias within evangelical Christianity as a case study to explore how nationalist movements justify prejudicial positions through framing privileged groups as victims. Since Anita Bryant’s late 1970s crusade against what was dubbed the “homosexual agenda,” white evangelicals have led a national movement opposing LGBTQ rights in the United States. Through a commitment to ensuring sexual minorities are excluded from civil rights protections, white evangelicals have contributed to a cultural and legal landscape conducive to anti-LGBTQ structural violence. This opposition is most often understood as rooted in love, and not in bias or hate, as demonstrated during long-term ethnographic research among white evangelical churches in Colorado Springs. Engaging with theories of morality and nationalism, this article argues that most biased political movements understand their motivation as defending a moral order and not perpetuating bias. In this way they can justify...
Australian Feminist Studies, 2022
This article introduces the special issue on Climate Change, Gender, and Authoritarianism: Entang... more This article introduces the special issue on Climate Change, Gender, and
Authoritarianism: Entanglements of Anti-Feminism and Anti-Environmentalism in the Far-Right. Starting from the hypothesis that anti-feminism functions as a meta language in the far-right’s fight against liberal democracy as well as social and environmental justice, this special issue explores how anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism merge and inform one another in contemporary far-right discourses and politics on climate change. Focusing on the connections that form the tissue of far-right imaginaries of sex, gender, race, and the nation in the context of the simultaneous dismissal and mobilisation of ecological issues, a
broad picture of the state of research on the entanglement of anti-feminism and anti-environmentalism in the far-right will be laid out. In doing so, this special issue aims at providing us with a much-needed insight into the gendered and racialised political ecology of the contemporary far-right.
Men Who Hate Women and Women Who Kick Their Asses
This seminar examines how cultural values and cultural politics coalesce in public attitudes and ... more This seminar examines how cultural values and cultural politics coalesce in public attitudes and debates over climate change. Media coverage of scientific research on climate will be a major focus, with attention to how journalists, interest groups, and other writers represent climate change, climate science, and competing perspectives. Students will learn to use qualitative research methods for media analysis and data analysis to carry out an original research project. Across two essays and a podcast we will focus on the writing process, highlighting the importance of free-writing, editing, and peer critique in developing powerful writing.
Syllabus for an undergraduate course in the anthropology of reproduction.
How does gender matter? How does our gender impact our experience? How do people perform their ge... more How does gender matter? How does our gender impact our experience? How do people perform their gender and sexuality, masculinity and femininity? How are these performances related to social, cultural, and political power? How does religious practice impact ideas about gender and sexuality? These are the questions guiding this course. We will explore these questions through discussion, close reading of theoretical and ethnographic texts, videos, and the completion of an original research project.
CALL FOR PAPERS TO STREAMS: 250-word PAPER ABSTRACTS – oriented to the accepted stream proposa... more CALL FOR PAPERS TO STREAMS:
250-word PAPER ABSTRACTS – oriented to the accepted stream proposals –can now be submitted. ALL PAPERS MUST BE SUBMITTED THROUGH THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE at affect-sub@millersville.edu. The final deadline for submissions is MONDAY, MAY 18. The conference website will keep a master file of all submissions to the various accepted streams.
To aid with proper routing, PLEASE INCLUDE THE STREAM # and/or NAME OF THE STREAM in the subject-line of your emailed paper submission. The email attachment of your abstract should be in Word or pdf. Abstracts can be single-authored or co-authored.
http://www.affecttheorymu.com/s13-engaging-religious-and-secular-affect/
Paralleling contemporary challenges to secular states in Europe, India, the United States, and Turkey, recent critical studies have problematized the perceived boundaries between the religious and the secular. This scholarship highlights, rather, the mutual construction of the religious and the secular in modern politics, law, education, or medicine. While this body of work has brought forth a heightened awareness of secularism’s discursive architecture and regulative mechanisms, the pre-discursive life of the secular remains much less explored (with notable exceptions, such as William Connolly, Talal Asad, and Saba Mahmood). This stream aims to facilitate a conversation about possible new pathways into the study of religious and secular affects by inviting panel and paper proposals around three sets of questions.
What does the secular look like when we consider its emotional registers, visceral energies, and embodied commitments? Can we speak of secular affect as a distinct kind? What are the possible sites of comparison between secular and religious affects? Sara Ahmed suggested that affect is generated in the circulation of emotions between bodies, signs, and objects. In what ways are secular and religious economies of affective circulation organized differently? The focus on affective economies can help us consider religion not simply as a matter of believing in a transcendent power, but an effect of various entanglements between persons and things. Can affect theory offer new ways of thinking about the secular and secular entanglements?
What role(s) do emotions play in secular criticism? Defining itself against religion’s ‘zeal’, secular criticism often presupposes a self that is impervious to emotional intensities (e.g., Muslim sensitivities concerning visual representation of Muhammad) that may cloud public reasoning and judgment. What are the affective conditions of the production of this image of an autonomous secular self? How are secular subjectivities reshaped in the flows of life, wherein diverse energies and forces disrupt the religious/secular divide (e.g., unexpected spiritual experiences, capitalism’s enchantments, or solidarities between religious and non-religious groups)?
How might paying attention to secular and religious affect change the way researchers approach the study of religious communities? How can we think of, for instance, an ‘atheist’ ethnographer who finds herself drawn by the charismatic oratory and emotional ambiance of a congregation while repulsed by references to Biblical condemnation of homosexuality? The academic study of religion often considers such predicaments as a reflection of an insider/outsider dilemma, focusing on the conceptual stakes of research encounters. This often overlooks what roles visceral contacts (via wonder, apathy, or disgust) play in academic knowledge-production. In what ways can a researcher communicate such affective experiences to her audience? How might engaging with the affective dimension of religious practice elucidate the persistence of religious mobilizations within secular modernity?
