¹ Humez, Jean McMahon, “Introduction,” in Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, ed. Humez, Jean McMahon (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 9Google Scholar.

² Walker, Alice, “Review of Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress,” The Black Scholar 12, no. 5 (Sept/Oct 1981): 64–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 64.

³ In the United States, the association of celibacy with restriction and oppression may be linked to the contemporary evangelical purity campaigns and their investment in maintaining harmful systems of power. An overview of Sara Moslener's current After Purity Project states that “the Evangelical Purity Movement created a sexual ethic rooted in strict gender roles, racial purity, and control over women's bodies beginning in the early 1990s.” Hailey Nelson, “Power after Purity,” Office of Research and Graduate Studies, Central Michigan University, accessed November 15, 2021, https://www.cmich.edu/offices-departments/office-research-graduate-studies/focus-on-faculty/faculty-highlight-stories/power-after-purity. For an excellent expanded discussion, see Moslener's Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence (London: Oxford University Press, 2015). The title of a recent memoir by Linda Kay Klein also emphasizes the detrimental effect of abstinence education and purity campaigns specifically on young women: Klein, Linda Kay, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018)Google Scholar.

⁴ Kittredge Cherry, “The Two Rebeccas: Queer Black Pair Founded Shaker Religious Community in 1800s,” Q Spirit, https://qspirit.net/two-rebeccas-queer-black-shaker/

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ French, Kara, Against Sex: Identities of Sexual Restraint in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ French's book is particularly important because of the gap in studies of Black celibate women in the nineteenth century. In studies of the nineteenth century, there has been considerable room and nuance for celibate white women, particularly for white women explicitly engaged in women's rights struggles. As Benjamin Kahan notes, “[B]eginning in the 1840s, celibacy takes shape as a political identity for men and women; nearly all the first-generation American leaders of the suffrage movement—including Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Antoinette Brown—took lifelong vows of celibacy.” See Benjamin Kahan's fantastic Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 13. As Kahan notes, only Anthony keeps those vows; nevertheless, the suspicion of marriage “suggests the deep connections between celibacy and the culture of reform.” For more, see DuBois, Elle Carol, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980)Google Scholar. Much of the connection between reform and celibacy connected to women's attempts to resist coverture laws, which meant that once a woman married, she lost all legal and economic freedom. Kahan has a great brief explainer of how coverture affected white, middle-class women. See Kahan, Celibacies, 13–17. For more on coverture, see Korobkin, Laura Hanft, Criminal Conversations: Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of Adultery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Much scholarship has understood celibacy as strategic for some women in the nineteenth century. For more on mid-century feminist strategies (including celibacy), see Zwarg, Christina, Feminist Conversation: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nevertheless, this scholarship has almost completely focused on the strategic nature of celibacy for white middle- and upper-class women, particularly those who articulate their celibacy as a political and social decision, instead of a religious one.

⁸ Coviello, Peter, “The Wild Not Less Than the Good: Thoreau, Sex, Biopower,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23, no. 4 (2017): 509–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 510.

⁹ Like Coviello, “I have no interest in abandoning this tradition.” Coviello, “The Wild Not Less Than the Good,” 511.

¹⁰ Ann Pellegrini, charting a genealogy of queer theory, muses, “I have been struck by the way queer studies . . . proceeds through a secular imaginary within which religion, if it is to appear at all, must be made to appear as arch-conservative enemy of progress.” Pellegrini, Ann, “Feeling Secular,” Women and Performance 19, no. 2 (2009), 207CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Tracy Fessenden argues that secular feminism continues to bolster racial hierarchies through “a history of cooperation between movements to expand women's freedom, on the one hand, and movements to consolidate Anglo-Saxon domination, on the other,” a narrative she insists has been written out of histories of Western feminisms. Fessenden, Tracy, “Disappearences: Race, Religion, and the Progress Narrative of U.S. Feminism” in Secularisms, ed. Jakobsen, Janet R. and Pellegrini, Ann (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 139–61Google Scholar, especially 140–41. An earlier, expanded version of this argument appears in Fessenden, Tracy, Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 161–80Google Scholar. In Culture and Redemption, Fessenden argues that Western secularism is so tied to Protestantism that it can be difficult to see secular forms and ideals as influenced by a particular form of Christianity.

¹¹ Pellegrini, “Feeling Secular,” 208.

¹² The following discussion relies on Mahmood, Saba, Politics and Piety: Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar, especially chapter 1, 1–38.

¹³ Mahmood writes that, despite being indebted to poststructuralist debates, “my analysis also departs from these frameworks insomuch as I question the overwhelming tendency within poststructuralist feminist scholarship to conceptualize agency in terms of subversion or resignification of social norms, to locate agency within those operations that resist the dominating and subjectivating modes of power. In other words, I will argue that the normative political subject of poststructuralist feminist theory often remains a liberatory one, whose agency is conceptualized on the binary model of subordination and subversion. In doing so, this scholarship elides dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance.” Mahmood, Politics and Piety, 14.

¹⁴ This misreading of religious Black women is particularly acute when those women's beliefs or practices aren't easily categorized, or when they demonstrate syncretism. Two of the most exciting studies of Rebecca Jackson's work discuss the evidence of Yoruba influences in her visions. See Bassard, Katherine Clay, “Rituals of Desire: Spirit, Culture, and Sexuality in the Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson,” in Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 108–25Google Scholar. See also Bostic, Joy, “Look at What You Have Done: Sacred Power and Reimagining the Divine,” in African American Female Mysticism: Nineteenth-Century Religious Activism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 95–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Delgado, Dara, “The Practicality of Holiness: A Historical Examination of Class, Race and Gender within Black Holiness Pentecostalism, Bishop Ida Bell Robinson, and the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America,” Pneuma 41 (2019): 50–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an excellent discussion on practices of modesty, see especially 59–64. Delgado engages a number of other excellent works meditating on the meanings of sexual and sartorial modesty for Black women. See especially Douglas, Kelly Brown, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999)Google Scholar; Collins, Patricia Hill, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Williams, Delores, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), especially 15–33Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Coviello, “The Wild Not Less Than the Good,” 521.

¹⁸ For good information about the composition and publication of Jackson's text, see Humez, “Introduction” and “A Note on the Text,” both in Gifts of Power, 1–64 and 65–68.

¹⁹ In the intervening decade, Jackson worked as an itinerant preacher, for a time preaching and living with a perfectionist utopian community called the Little Band. She left the Little Band because they did not advocate or practice celibacy. See Humez, Gifts of Power, especially 157–63.

²⁰ In my research, I have found no scholarship on Black Shakers beyond Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot. Archivally, I have found evidence of one other Black Shaker in Virginia named Anna Middleton, referenced in Bauer, Cheryl, The Shakers of Union Village (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2007)Google Scholar. Bauer cites a document from the Edna L. Bowyer Record Center and Archives of Warren County: “The Worley Agreement was signed by Malcolm and his wife, Peggy, Turtle Creek landowners William Wilson and Robert Wilson, and Anna Middleton. Middleton was the second western Shaker convert and a nineteen-year-old former slave from Virginia. Samuel Rollins and Calvin Morrell, early Union Village leaders, witnessed the signings. Middleton could only make her mark at the time, but by the 1820s, night classes for women were held at Union Village to help all members become literate.” Bauer, The Shakers of Union Village, 12. Certainly, there were more Black Shakers, but probably not many. Elizabeth Freeman's book Beside You in Time has an interesting chapter on how anti-Shakers used racialized imagery as a mode of critique. Freeman, Elizabeth, Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American 19th Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 27–51Google Scholar.

²¹ Jackson, Rebecca, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, ed. Humez, Jean McMahon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 72Google Scholar.

²² Jackson herself chronicles meeting Jarena Lee. Jackson, Gifts of Power, 262. Katherine Bassard has an excellent read of this exchange. Bassard, “Rituals of Desire,” 108–11. For a good introduction to Jarena Lee, see Junior, Nyasha, An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2015), especially 48–50Google Scholar.

²³ This structure shows up in well-known and lesser-known religious autobiographies, including those by Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Fanny Newell, and Charles Finney. Jarena Lee, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel. Revised and Corrected from the Original Manuscript, Written by Herself, in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, ed. William L. Andrews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 25–48; Zilpha Elaw, Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, An American Female of Colour; Together With Some Account of the Great Religious Revivals in America [Written by Herself], in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, ed. William L. Andrews (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 49–160; Newell, Fanny, Memoirs of Fanny Newell; Written by Herself, and published by the desire and request of numerous friends (New York: Springfield, 1833)Google Scholar; Finney, Charles, The Original Memoirs of Charles G. Finney, ed. Rosell, Garth M. and Dupuis, Richard A. G. (New York: Zondervan, 1989)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Andrews, William L., “Introduction,” in Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Andrews, William L. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 1–22Google Scholar. Jackson's writings, Humez argues, “are centrally concerned with how religious vision and ecstatic experience functioned for her and other women of her time as a source of personal power, enabling them to make radical change in the outward circumstances of their lives.” Humez, “Introduction,” 1.

²⁵ Butler is discussing women of the Church of God in Christ and, although she is discussing the twentieth century, her emphasis on both the personal and the social-political implication of sanctification helpfully illuminates nineteenth-century Black women's sanctification beliefs and practices. See Butler, Anthea, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 6Google Scholar.

²⁶ See Lee, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, and Elaw, Memoirs of the Life. For good work on Lee and Elaw, see Moody, Joycelyn, “Sin-Sick Souls: Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw,” in Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 51–75Google Scholar. Also see Nyasha Junior's recent conversation with Catherine Brekus about Jarena Lee. Nyasha Junior, “Jarena Lee as Protestant Icon: A Conversation with Nyasha Junior and Catherine Brekus,” November 2020, Harvard Divinity School, lecture, 43 minutes, available on SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/harvard-divinity-school/jarena-lee-as-protestant-icon-a-conversation-with-nyasha-junior-and-catherine-brekus. Andrews argues that women like Lee and Elaw enacted a “brand of feminist activism within Christianity [that] evolved out of [the] conviction that salvation made possible the gift of spiritual ‘sanctification’,” an argument that pertains as well to Jackson. Andrews, “Introduction,” 4.

²⁷ Jackson, Gifts of Power, 76–77.

²⁸ Although there are connections between Jackson and her contemporary Black women preachers, as Humez notes, Jackson's writings most strongly portray “the conflict a married religious woman felt when her sense of duty as a Christian wife clashed with her need to put herself entirely at the disposal of the inner power than transformed her.” Humez, “Introduction,” 8.

²⁹ Jackson, Gifts of Power, 77.

³⁰ Ibid., 76–77.

³¹ Ibid., 147.

³² The two passages are separated in Jackson's writings, and are chronologically tangled. The first, “My Life at Stake,” describes Samuel Jackson's violent responses, Jackson's divine protection, and Samuel's eventual relinquishing. The second, “My Release from Bondage” describes Jackson telling Samuel she will no longer serve him, obliquely references Samuel's violent responses, and then is an account of her ascetic practices. This section ends with Jackson describing Methodist ministers who also condemn Jackson to death, so persecution by her husband includes persecution by the denomination. See Jackson, Gifts of Power, 145 and 147.

³³ Ibid., 145.

³⁴ Ibid., 147.

³⁵ Ibid., 145–46.

³⁶ Ibid., 146.

³⁷ In the midst of describing leaving Samuel, Jackson discusses an 1831 vision “of God's true people on earth, who live in Christ and Christ in them.” Jackson explains that she first had the vision of God's people when “under great sorrow and suffering about living a holy virgin life, [when] everything seemed to stand in opposition to that life.” Mourning being alone in her commitment to celibacy, Jackson has a vision of “flocks of kids” who represent God's people, and whom God promises to unite Jackson with, as long as she is “faithful.” In other words, God promises that her reward for obedience and celibacy will be finding a community of God's people on earth. Jackson, Gifts of Power, 136–37.

³⁸ Ibid., 138–39.

³⁹ Stein, Stephen J., The Shaker Experience in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 61Google Scholar.

⁴⁰ French, Against Sex, 72.

⁴¹ Ibid., 63.

⁴² Kern, Louis J., An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias—The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Durham: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 3–4Google Scholar.

⁴³ Stein, The Shaker Experience, 64. They also practiced economic sharing. Upon full entrance into a Shaker community, a believer had to rescind all goods to the community, and all earnings made by the community went to the community. This was standard practice for a number of communitarian groups but, Stein argues, “the most successful communitarians in the early 19th century were the Shakers.” Stein, The Shaker Experience, 57.

⁴⁴ Many scholars today take for granted that Shakers believed that Ann Lee was the second coming of Christ. This interpretation assumes a certain amount of theological consistency that just wasn't present. Stein notes, “Despite its name, the United Society of Believers has never been united in any simple way . . . on the contrary, my reading of the extensive documentary records of the society and of those interacting with its members forces me to conclude that the Shakers were an extremely factious people.” Stein, The Shaker Experience, xiv. As with most beliefs, Shakers held to a range of beliefs about Lee's fulfillment of the return of Christ. Robley Whitson argues that Shakers only believed that Lee was the second coming of Christ for a brief period, from about 1837–1857. Whitson insists that “the period when the exaggerations [about Ann Lee as Christ existed] was very brief, a mere twenty years, and even then the extreme enthusiasts were actually few in number.” Rather, according to Whitson, most believers saw Christ as “equally in each and every one united in Christ.” Ann Lee was seen as a spiritual Mother, and Christ's second coming was in every believer. Whitson, Robley, “Introduction,” in The Shakers: Two Centuries of Spiritual Reflection, ed. Whitson, Robley Edward (Mahweh, NJ: Paulist, 1982), 43–45Google Scholar. Nevertheless, as Stein points out (and Whitson acknowledges), a key 1808 Shaker text—Elder Benjamin Youngs’ Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing—aims to prove that Christ's second appearing was in Ann Lee. Stein, The Shaker Experience, 78–80. See Benjamin Youngs’ theology excerpted in Robley Edward Whitson, ed., The Shakers: Two Centuries of Spiritual Reflection (Mahweh, NJ: Paulist, 1983), 225–26. Supporting Whitson's claim is the contemporary Shaker insistence that they have never believed that Ann Lee was God reincarnate. On the website for the last remaining Shaker community, they insist, “Mother Ann was not Christ, nor did she claim to be. She was simply the first of many Believers wholly embued by His spirit, wholly consumed by His love.” “Our Beliefs,” Shaker Village Sabbathday Lake, accessed October 10, 2021, https://www.maineshakers.com/about/#ourbeliefs.

⁴⁵ Bassard, “Rituals of Desire,” 113.

⁴⁶ Kitch, Sally, Chaste Liberation: Celibacy and Female Cultural Status (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 7Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Moody has a helpful discussion of simultaneous submission and insubordination in the works of Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw. See Moody, “Sin-Sick Souls,” 66.

⁴⁸ Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You in Time, 34, 39. As June Sprigg suggests, “[C]elibacy released Shakers from the demands of conventional marriage and parenthood,” thus situating them outside of the nineteenth-century family. Sprigg, June, “Introduction,” in Shaker Design (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1986), 19Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Brekus, Catherine A., Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 97–113Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Bassard here is building on work by Henri Desroche. Desroche, Henri, The American Shakers: From New-Christianity to Presocialism, trans. Savacool, John K. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971)Google Scholar. Medievalists may dispute Bassard's characterization of medieval monasticism. For more on medieval sexuality and chastity, see Karras, Ruth Mazo, “The Sexuality of Chastity,” in Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017), 36–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵¹ Bassard, Rituals of Desire, 113.

⁵² Bynam's essay “Why All the Fuss about the Body?” insists that scholars approach medieval understandings of bodies as unfamiliar. Caroline Walker Bynam, “Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (Autumn 1995): 1–33. Valerie Traub gives a related call to attend to how we study bodies (in particular as related to sex). Traub, Valerie, “Making Sexual Knowledge,” Early Modern Women 5 (Fall 2010): 251–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ In her landmark “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Phyllis Trible identifies and critiques the omnipresence of the reading of Genesis that “affirms male dominance and female subordination” and places blame in Eve. Trible, Phyllis, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41, no. 1 (Mar. 1973): 30–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 35–42. The doctrine of original sin—which declares that Adam and Eve's actions in the Garden of Eden violated God's commandment and resulted in all humans being born in a state of sin or separation from God—is almost always attributed to Augustine. Peter Sanlon questions this history. Peter Sanlon, “Original Sin in Patristic Theology,” in Adam, The Fall, and Original Sin: Theological, Biblical, and Scientific Perspectives, eds. Hans Madueme and Michael Reeves (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2014), 85–107.

⁵⁴ Youngs in Whitson, The Shakers, 225. This specific articulation supports Youngs’ claims that Ann Lee was the second coming of Christ. Youngs’ full statement is, “The woman was the first in the transgression, and therefore must be the last out of it, and by her the way of deliverance must be completed.”

⁵⁵ Jackson, Gifts of Power, 199. Kathleen M. Crowther posits that Reformation-era Lutheran exegesis of Genesis 3 was fundamentally about rejecting Catholic celibacy in favor of the patriarchal family. Crowther writes that the sixteenth-century Lutheran telling of the Garden of Eden emphasized “the Lutheran valorization of family life [that] was connection to their denial of the Catholic view that celibacy was spiritually superior to marriage,” and which privileges a family in which the man “wields authority over his wife and children” and the woman “is a docile and obedient wife and a devoted mother.” Crowther, Kathleen M., Adam and Eve in the Protestant Reformation (London: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Jackson, Gifts of Power, 199.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 244.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 205.

⁵⁹ The contemporary Sabbathday Lake Shakers ascribe to an “adoptionist theory,” which, like Jackson's theology, insists Jesus was not divine at birth. The adoptionist theory diverges from Jackson's theology, though, in positing that Jesus's divinity began at “the occasion of his baptism by John in the Jordan.” Shaker Village, “Our Beliefs,” https://www.maineshakers.com/about/#ourbeliefs.

⁶⁰ Jackson, Gifts of Power, 205.

⁶¹ Ibid., 189.

⁶² Ibid., 190.

⁶³ Ibid., 181.

⁶⁴ A number of recent theological traditions work to emphasize the love of fleshiness in the Bible, and in particular in the Gospels. For many of these writers, affirming flesh is a path to overcoming patriarchy, white supremacy, fat phobia, and homophobia. For many, too, it is simply a more accurate or appropriate telling of the Bible as one that celebrates in flesh. A number of womanist theologians have insisted that theological understandings of incarnation and the flesh more generally require attention to gender and race. Eboni Marshall Turman limns the relationship between the early Church wrestling with “the apparent illogical body of Christ” and the American “crisis of identity that has characteristically fragmented black bodies.” Turman, Eboni Marshall, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Relatedly, Anthony Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkin's collection Loving the Body asks how body theology might be used toward antiracist ends. Anthony Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins, eds., Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Lisa Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart's collection on Body Theology posits that a key change in the Reformation was in understandings of the body. Isherwood and Stuart write, “The Protestant Reformation actually shifted the emphasis from sensual engagement with God to mental communion through the word of the gospels. . . . The Reformation encouraged people to experiences their minds as separate from and superior to their bodies.” Lisa Isherwood and Stuart, Elizabeth, Introducing Body Theology (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic, 1998), 12Google Scholar. Isherwood addresses some of the painful results of suspicion of the body in her book The Fat Jesus: Christianity and Body Image (New York: Seabury, 2008). Finally, Bynum's essay counters poststructuralist vacating of the body by way of medieval religious writings.

⁶⁵ Whitson, “Introduction,” 13.

⁶⁶ Ibid.

⁶⁷ Jackson, Gifts of Power, 179–180.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 181–82.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 182.

⁷⁰ Bassard, Rituals of Desire, 109.

⁷¹ For an excellent primer on Black sexuality studies, see Stacey Patton, “Who's Afraid of Black Sexuality?” The Chronicle Review, December 03, 2012, https://www.chronicle.com/article/whos-afraid-of-black-sexuality/.

⁷² Celeste Watkin-Hayes in Patton, “Who's Afraid.”

⁷³ Hollywood, Amy, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 6Google Scholar. Hollywood is writing about thinkers in twentieth-century French intellectual feminism who were drawn to the writings of female mystics. Whereas the mystical figures Hollywood addresses worked within male-dominated religious communities, Jackson insists on operating outside of male domination (with some success).

⁷⁴ Furey's writing is specifically about premodern and early modern religious texts, but I think some of her theorizing works beyond that time frame, particularly with regard to mystical texts. Furey, Constance, “Sexuality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Hollywood, Amy and Beckman, Patricia Z. (London: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 328–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁵ Jackson, Gifts of Power, 148.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 148–49.