Religion, Sex, Citizenship

Catalog description

An exploration of the relationship between religion, sex, and citizenship with a focus on the United States. What has been the role of religion in the creation of sexual norms in United States history? How has this relationship changed over time, in relation to intersecting systems of class and race? What are “family values” and where did they come from? What is secularism, and does it promote sexual freedom? This course takes up questions like these, anchoring its inquiry in interdisciplinary feminist theories of gender and sexuality. Linking theoretical texts to a range of grounded contexts—from Court rulings on religious freedom, to fights over sex education in schools, to militarized sexual violence, to capitalism’s regimes of gendered labor—students will develop critical vocabularies for analyzing intimacies between religion, sex, and politics in American empire.