Provoking Religion : Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars

Since the 1980s, feminist and queer art has been branded by the Christian Right as sacrilegious or pornographic-sometimes both. But how and why did visual art take center stage in these culture war battles? Provoking Religion provides a new interpretation of the history of the culture wars, one that avoids simply pitting religious conservatives against secular progressives. Anthony Petro explains how the literalist rhetoric of conservative Christians reduced art to obscenity and why so many feminist and queer artists-including Judy Chicago, David Wojnarowicz, and Renee Cox--were drawn to religious imagery in their creative work, often casting their own religious and theological visions.

In the late twentieth century, artists were on the front lines of the culture wars. Leaders of the Christian Right in the U.S. made a national spectacle out of feminist and queer art, blasting it as sacrilegious or pornographic--and sometimes both. On the bully pulpits of television and talk radio, as well as in the halls of Congress, conservatives denounced artists ranging from Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Chicago to Marlon Riggs and David Wojnarowicz. Conservatives, alarmed by shifting sex and gender norms, collided with progressive artists who were confronting sexism, homophobia, and racism. In Provoking Religion, Anthony Petro offers a compelling new history of the culture wars that places competing moralities of gender and sexuality alongside competing visions of the sacred. The modern culture wars, he shows, are best understood not as contests pitting religious conservatives against secular activists, but as a series of ongoing historical struggles to define the relationship between the sacred and the political.Through captivating case studies of "subversive" artists, Provoking Religion illuminates the underside of the culture wars, revealing how progressive artists and activists rendered from those most apparently profane aspects of human life-the stuff of conservatives'' worst nightmares--their own haunting visions of the sacred.