Dr. Amy Langenberg

Amy Paris Langenberg (R&SAP Leadership Team member) is a specialist in classical South Asian Buddhism with a focus on monasticism, gender, sexuality, and the body. She also conducts ethnographic research on contemporary Buddhist feminisms, contemporary female Buddhist monasticism, and, more recently, sexual abuse in American Buddhism. She is currently interested in how notions of agency, autonomy, freedom, and consent function in contemporary religious communities, and the role of affect, the body, and emotion in religious life.

Langenberg’s monograph, Birth in Buddhism: The Suffering Fetus and Female Freedom was published by Routledge in 2017 as part of the Critical Studies in Buddhism series. In addition, she has published articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, History of Religions, Religions, Religion Compass, and the Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics. Her current project is a collaborative book on generative responses to sexual abuse in American Buddhism, to be co-written with Ann Gleig (University of Central Florida) and published with Yale University Press. 

Supported Project:

Dr. Ann Gleig and Dr. Amy Paris Langenberg, “Sexual Violation in American Buddhism: Interpretive Frameworks, Emergent Ethics, and Generative Frameworks”

Since the 1980s, American Buddhist convert communities have been the site of reoccurring cases of sexual misconduct and abuse. The widespread nature of these abuses, which have cut across Buddhist lineages, has led to deep questioning as well as painful schisms within American Buddhist communities as they wrestle with the doctrinal, authoritative, and organizational implications. Our collaborative book project, which is under advance contract with Yale University Press, is an attempt to map out, contextualize, and analyze sexual violations in American Buddhism. Combining deep textual work with ethnographic case studies, we explore questions such as: How have Asian Buddhist doctrines and institutions set the terms of sexual abuse in American Buddhist environments? How can we understand the complex religious and socio-cultural contexts that foster environments in which abuse can occur? What specific Buddhist discourses and practices are mobilized around sexual misconduct and the cultures of secrecy that enable it to flourish? How have American Buddhists responded to these violations and what are their generative effects; for instance, what new doctrinal and organizational forms of Buddhism are emerging from them? Our work fills a lacuna in Buddhist Studies scholarship, which has yet to produce any comprehensive scholarship on sexual abuse in classical or contemporary Buddhism.