Blood on the Stones: Race, Epidemiology, and Theology

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Khytie Brown

Abstract

This paper takes up Gil Anidjar’s concept of hemophilia—the love of blood—as a defining relational feature of Christianity and expands his critique through an examination of what blood as symbol, construction, and fiction reveals about the role of the racialized human body in contemporary theological and U.S. secular cultural imaginations. It discursively traces how the symbolism (and reality) of blood informs, sanctions, and responds to notions of race and racialized state violence by thinking through the epidermis and the making of race anthropologically, paying attention to the history of science. It moves on to epidemiological and social constructions of blood purity—emblematized in concepts of disease and contagion—and finally draws on the works of contemporary theologians to examine what it might mean to love blood ethically rather than violently and perversely.

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