Biofaiths

Catholic women growing up in post-war England did so against the backdrop of significant shifts in both sexual and religious culture. This article explores how they made sense of their acquisition of sexual knowledge in the years surrounding the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s. Rather than assuming a passive process of acquisition, it focuses on how Catholic girls and young women negotiated religious, scientific and embodied sources of knowledge to generate their own narratives of sexual understanding. The study draws on personal testimonies from twenty-seven Catholic women who were interviewed between 2011 and 2015 as part of an oral history project on memories of sex and sexuality in post-war Britain. These oral histories are analysed alongside the pronouncements and prescriptions of Catholic authorities—Papal encyclical letters, sexual advice literature and nascent sex education programmes—to investigate the flow of sexual knowledge between the organs of the Catholic Church and ordinary laypeople. The article ultimately develops a new lens through which to understand the nexus of religious and scientific forms of sexual knowledge in a late-modern context, described here as ‘biofaiths’. Instead of opposing the ‘facts’ of biology with the ideology of religion, the framework of biofaiths draws into focus the entanglements between these mutually constitutive categories. This study of biofaiths therefore contributes to work which troubles what Joan Scott has described as ‘sexularism’—the assumption that secularism encourages the free expression of modern sexuality—by foregrounding the agency that religious actors exercised in generating faith-based understandings of the body and its processes.