Corporate, corporal, collective: Reflections on bodies, genres, and the ongoing troubling of the categories of religion and the secular

The authors engage in the perpetual work of analysing the conjunction of religion, secularity, embodiment, and power with a wide variety of sources, including life writing, ethnographic fieldwork, and bureaucratic documents. As these examples show, however, efforts to transform bodies into virtuous and healthy creatures come from within and without, from powers and agencies that include racist tropes, corporate propaganda, and state interests as much as internal desires and embodied perseverance. Similarly, when scholars of religion, in particular, seek to understand religion and the body, the sites for their reflection extend well beyond what might be considered conventional sources for the study of religion, such as texts, rituals, and art. They turn their attention to sites often unmarked as 'religious', such as state-based fitness programs, health care, the gendered experience of play, corporate advertising campaigns, and more. A third and final theme: transforming bodies may be both corporate and corporal, both a collective project and an individual endeavour.