Sexual Heresies: Religion, Science, and Sexuality in Modern Britain with Joy Dixon

Join NACBS to discuss Joy Dixon’s latest book, Sexual Heresies: Religion, Science, and Sexuality in Modern Britain. Benjamin Kahan will join Dixon in conversation.

October 22 at 12pm EST/ 11am CST/ 10am MST / 9am PST / 5pm BST

“In Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, the new sexual sciences—from anthropological accounts of religion as rooted in ancient fertility cults to psychoanalytic theories that explained religious experience in terms of psychosexual development—characterized religion as closely connected to the sexual. The outcome, as Joy Dixon argues, was a new sense that religion itself could be sexually suspect. One result was an increasing concern to police "sexual heresies" to produce a supposedly normal (healthy, monogamous, and heterosexual) religiosity. The overall effect was a narrowing of the sexual possibilities inside "orthodox" religion and the association of alternative forms of religion with dissident sexualities that continues to shape both religion and secularism today. Drawing on a wide range of materials from diverse elements of British society, this book emphasizes the dynamic relationships between the histories of religion and of sexuality and the historical contingency of the categories we use to understand the relationship between the two.”

Joy Dixon is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and the author of Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England, published by Johns Hopkins UP in 2001. With the publication of Sexual Heresies by Stanford UP in 2026 they are now working on two new projects: a co-authored book (with Sue Morgan) for Bloomsbury Academic, Sex and Christianity before the Sexual Revolution: Religion and the Shaping of Modern Sexual Culture in Britain, 1880-1960, and a book-length SSHRC-funded study of evangelicalism and sexuality, Sex and the Evangelical Modern in Britain since 1945.

Benjamin Kahan is the Herbert Huey McElveen Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Louisiana State University. He has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and a number of other institutions. He is the author of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, 2013) and The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality (Chicago, 2019), and the forthcoming Sexual Aim and Its Misses: On the Birth of the Sexual Subject. He is also the editor of Journal of the History of Sexuality, The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature (Cambridge, 2024), and a co-editor of Theory Q, a book series from Duke University Press.