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

In many African societies today Christian churches, Pentecostals in particular, are an important source of information on sexuality, relationships, the body, and health, motivated in part by the HIV/AIDS pandemic but also related to globally circulating ideas and images that make people rethink gender relations and identities through the lens of 'romantic love'. Contextualizing the contemporary situation in the history of Christian movements in Africa, and by applying Foucault's notion of heterotopia, this introduction and the subsequent papers show that Christian doctrines and practices are creating social spaces of altering relational ethics, identities and gender roles that appeal especially to upwardly mobile women.