Dr. Kent Brintnall

Kent L. Brintnall (R&SAP Leadership Team member) is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies and affiliate faculty in the Women’s & Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research areas include religion and sexuality, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and the work of Georges Bataille. He is the author of Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure, the editor of Embodied Religion, and the co-editor of Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies and Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion. He is currently working on a monograph on the intractability of violence as well as a co-edited volume on the work of Lee Edelman and religion. He regularly teaches a research seminar on the Catholic sex abuse crisis and is particularly interested in locating narratives, discourses, and rhetorics of the crisis in larger histories of sexuality and sexual regulation. He is also a co-organizer and steering committee member of the American Academy of Religion’s Catholic sex abuse seminar.

Supported Project:

Dr. Kent Brintnall, “Contextualizing the Catholic Sexual Abuse Crisis”

This project seeks to place the Catholic sex abuse crisis into a larger history of efforts to identify, respond to, and ameliorate sexual harm. This history shows that such efforts—as well-meaning and vital as they might be—are susceptible to exaggerations of the harm under consideration, are easily co-opted for agendas that have nothing to do with the interests of survivors of sexual violence, and are inevitably shaped by the cultural moment during which they arise.

The events that constitute the Catholic sex abuse crisis coincide with massive changes in cultural attitudes toward sexuality, including both homosexuality and sexual abuse; they overlap with the excesses of the Satanic Panic as well as feminist efforts to draw attention to sexual violence; they coincide with radical shifts in expert and general conceptions of children’s relation to sexuality, the very phenomenon of sexual abuse, and the figure of the sex abuser. 

While examining the Catholic sex abuse crisis from such a perspective can be read as undermining the experience of individual survivors or as justifying the actions of institutional actors, it is ultimately an effort to understand the work that is done by attending to sexual harm in particular ways so that we might always be learning how to respond better to the harm that sexual violence inflicts.