Christian creations of new spaces of sexuality, reproduction, and relationships in Africa : exploring faith and religious heterotopia: a special issue

In many African societies today Christian churches, in particular Pentecostal churches, are an important source of information on sexuality, relationships, the body and health. This is motivated in part by the HIV/AIDS pandemic but is also related to globally circulating ideas and images that make people rethink gender relations and identities through the lens of "romantic love". Under the title 'Christian creations of new spaces of sexuality, reproduction and relationships in Africa: exploring faith and religious heterotopia' the articles contextualize the contemporary situation in the history of Christian movements in Africa and apply Foucault's notion of "heterotopia": a space that inverts or contests the dominant power relations and that, in contrast to "utopia", factually exists. Christian doctrines and practices are creating social spaces of altering relational ethics, identities and gender roles that appeal especially to upwardly mobile women. The introduction by Astrid Bochow and Rijk van Dijk iis followed by: Reconstructing sexuality in the shadow of neoliberal globalization: investigating the approach of charismatic churches in southwestern Nigeria (Tola Olu Pearce); Singleness, sexuality, and the dream of marriage (South Africa) (Maria Frahm-Arp); The love of Jesus never disappoints: reconstituting female personhood in urban Madagascar (Jennifer Cole); Creating illegitimacy: negotiating relations and reproduction within Christian contexts in northwest Namibia (Julia Pauli); Afro-Brazilian Pentecostal re-formations of relationships across two generations of Mozambican women (Linda van de Kamp); Postscript: the Love Boat, or the elementary forms of charismatic life (Ramon Sarroï). [ASC abstract]