Holy Men, Vulnerable Men: Embodied Heterosexuality, Male Agency, and the Production of Harm in Haredi Communities

• In Event: Critical heterosexualities in the Sociology of Sexualities

Abstract

How do people come to regulate their bodies, desires, and sexual behaviors? Drawing on an ethnographic study of Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox Jewish) communities in New York, this paper explores heterosexuality as a site of social production and regulation. Within these communities, sexuality is not a matter of individual preference, but rather a religious discipline woven into everyday life. Sexual behavior is a central dimension of religious practice in that the ways in which one experiences, manages, and represses desire are fundamental to what it means to be an observant man or woman. Focusing on male sexual subjectivity, this paper highlights a central problem: norms demanding ascetic restraint paradoxically justify sexual coercion as spiritual necessity, scripting men as both controlled agents and latent threats. Masturbation exemplifies this tension, intertwining religious aspiration with profound anxiety and rationales for harm, both self-directed (guilt, distress) and other-directed (entitlement over others’ bodies). This case study offers a lens into how heterosexuality, as both identity and embodied practice, is constructed through institutionalized norms of gender, holiness, and morality. Drawing on theories of sexual scripting (Gagnon and Simon), doing gender (West and Zimmerman), and precarious manhood (Vandello and Bosson), this paper extends sociological theories of sexuality by emphasizing the embodied, affective, and disciplinary dimensions of heterosexual socialization – heterosexuality as felt in muscular habits, somatic guilt, and moral vigilance. The Haredi case makes visible how heterosexuality is produced, managed, and justified through religious and cultural technologies of the body.

Authors

• Gloria Fortuna, Columbia University

• Alicia Jen, Columbia University

• Jessie Ford, Columbia University

• Jessica Weissman

• Jennifer S. Hirsch, Columbia University