In this talk, Oberlin Visiting Professor of Religion Daniel Schultz will show how Foucault’s history of sexuality project moves through religious archives and practices, with a focus on the forms of critical gender analysis that emerge from this engagement.

The talk will explore the conceptual contours of Foucault’s later (and only recently published) lectures, and then move on to show how a “Foucauldian toolbox” has been taken up in certain practices of feminist ethnography (e.g., in the work of the late anthropologist Saba Mahmood) vis-à-vis theories of secularism, freedom, and (gendered) agency.