Anthony Petro's robustly interdisciplinary Provoking Religion expertly reimagines the terms and tactics of the Culture Wars. Revealing how the late-twentieth-century battle narrative pivoted around a divide managed by White Christian conservatives, their oppositional claims to "moral authority," and the reductive vise of their "literalist aesthetics," Petro illuminates the religion(s) and plural complexities and communities of the largely queer and feminist artists the wars staged as uniformly secular. Impressively innovative and smart, Provoking Religion issues a timely clarion in the literatures on religion and art, and well beyond.
Sally Promey, author of Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display Petro powerfully reorients our vision of how religion figures into the work of queer and feminist artists such as Ray Navarro, Judy Chicago, and Renée Cox. Moving beyond the flattening associations of their art with secular critique, Petro explores their sustained engagement-at once pained and playful-with religious traditions and symbols. The histrionics over sacrilege and obscenity give way to the subtle interpretation of visual and performance art so often shrouded by the canned narratives of the culture wars."
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis Petro's perceptive and pathbreaking book marks a major reframing of the Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, dispelling a long-invoked binary that has placed religion and spirituality at odds with queer and feminist art. Instead, Provoking Religion reveals not only how artists like Judy Chicago, David Wojnarowicz, and Renée Cox wrestled with religion but re-reads Christian opponents for their own aesthetic values. An interdisciplinary and theoretically rich intervention that will reshape how we understand recent U.S. history."
Stephen Vider, author of The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II Is it possible to turn the page on the seemingly endless US debates called "culture wars"? Anthony Petro's enlivening book suggests we can, particularly if we attend more carefully to the history, forms, symbols, aesthetics, and language of these debates. In a book teeming with life, death, art, spirit, realism, relativism, and vision (among many other qualities), the reader can learn about religion and history while also beginning to imagine new iconographies and new worlds."
Janet R. Jakobsen, author of The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics Anthony Petro's robustly interdisciplinary Provoking Religion expertly reimagines the terms and tactics of the Culture Wars. Revealing how the late-twentieth-century battle narrative pivoted around a divide managed by White Christian conservatives, their oppositional claims to "moral authority," and the reductive vise of their "literalist aesthetics," Petro illuminates the religion(s) and plural complexities and communities of the largely queer and feminist artists the wars staged as uniformly "secular." Impressively innovative and smart, Provoking Religion issues a timely clarion in the literatures on religion and art, and well beyond. * Sally Promey, Author of Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display *
