Religion is a force to be reckoned with in political debates over sex, but Janet Jakobsen decisively breaks with the common sense that religion and sex are the fixed binary of American political life. She instead follows the kaleidoscopic ways in which sexual politics are embedded in social relations of all kinds – not only the intimate relations of love and family with which gender and sex are routinely associated, but also secularism, freedom, race, disability, capitalism, nation and state, housing and the environment.

Janet Jakobsen is Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author, most recently, of The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics. Prof. Jakobsen will be interviewed by Graduate Student Fellow Emma Thompson.

The 2023-2024 theme for the Religion and the Public Conversation series is "Bodies and Embodiment."