Senior Research Seminar with Dr Maya Mayblin (University of Edinburgh)

Dr Maya Mayblin (University of Edinburgh)

Shadow Partners and Virile Celibacy: priests, sex, and secular politics in Brazil

In this talk, I explore the stories of a group of Catholic priests who enter the world of municipal government, and examine how queer, celibate, and heteronormative concepts of gender and sexuality are held in tension in the making of the priest as a secular political leader. Approaching clerical celibacy as a theopolitical performance, I examine its historical role in the making and unmaking of Brazilian church-state relations. In combination with ethnography, I point to what this history can tell us about Catholic constructions of the religious and the secular as categories constructed via the (in)exclusion of women.

Lecture theatre A, Arts School is located here: https://map.cam.ac.uk/Lecture+Theatre+A#52.203448,0.119533,17