Abstract

Religious discourses, institutions, and actors in various cultural and historical contexts construct maternal bodies distinctively from other types of bodies regarding sex and gender. This chapter considers sacred narratives and images, their interpretations, and historical-social practices, such as ritual, regarding fertility, producing new life in many forms with and without sexual intercourse, childbirth, nurturing, and maternal work. The maternal embodiment of the divine, superhuman, human, and animal birth givers and caregivers is considered through the lenses of key elements of maternal theory useful to religious studies. Going beyond gender essentialism and theorizing on religion and embodiment, this chapter offers an overview and critical perspectives on the pregnant, birthing, and postpartum body, and the maternal body as nurturing, as well as metaphors that appropriate such maternal processes in or under the influence of religious traditions.

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