Katherine Pratt Ewing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her recent publications include Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford University Press, 2008), Arguing Sainthood: Islam, Modernity and Psychoanalysis (Duke University Press, 1997) and, as editor, Being and Belonging: Muslims in the US Since 9/11 (Russell Sage Foundation, 2008).
Focusing on Oprah as an icon/inkblot, we can use our reactions to her as a Rorschach test: What do we project onto Oprah and what analytical blind spots result from these projections and the discursive anxieties that underlie them? The uneasiness, evident in Lofton’s tone throughout the book, is an index of fundamental contradictions that many of us, as members of the intellectual elite, embody.
Religion and the sex scandal are still closely linked, though the targets of public outrage have morphed: it is often religious authorities and bearers of traditional morality whose sexual desires and actions are publicized and condemned. With so many religious institutions and their authorities rocked by sex scandals in a litany of abuse and victimhood, it behooves us to ask what, precisely, is being exposed and denounced, and, conversely, what is being protected and perhaps even obscured. What aspects of “religion” are under fire in these scandals? What role does “spirituality” play in this discursive reconfiguration of sexuality and religion?
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