Thinking Sex: Theorizing the Intersections of Religion, Gender, Sexuality, and Power

Catalog description

In both the ancient and modern worlds, religion has been entwined with specific cultural understandings of gender, sexuality, and power. Gayle Rubin's seminal essay "Thinking Sex" (1984) demonstrated that there are not only intellectual but also moral and ethical reasons to scrutinize the religious and cultural underpinnings of gender, sex, and power. The next generation of scholars robustly answered Rubin's call by interrogating the diverse ways that humans have, in particular times and places, engaged religious understandings of gender and sexuality. Even more recently, scholars have applied queer theory "on the ground," testing and refining political and philosophical ideas about gender, sex and power through historical, anthropological, and sociological case studies. Much of this course focuses on these recent case studies, illustrating how religious conceptualizations of gender, sex, and power are enmeshed in everyday practices - including not only the ways that people pray, but especially the ways that we dress, eat, study, date, shack up, parent, and work. This methodology of interrogating assumptions has highlighted the sometimes-uncomfortable fact that various religious contexts have produced vastly different answers to seemingly basic questions about sex, including: - What is sex? Which activities constitute sexual acts? What sex acts are sacred / normal? Which sex acts are evil / pathologized? - What is gender? Is gender intrinsic at birth or culturally produced? How do gender identities shape social and behavioral expectations for particular individuals and groups? Are challenges to these expectations accommodated or taboo? - How are the boundaries of gender and sexuality patrolled? What power relations structure this policing? Who is included and uplifted by these norms? Who is excluded or harmed? Offered as RLGN 380 and WGST 380 . Counts as a Communication Intensive course. Counts as a Human Diversity & Commonality course. Counts as a Moral & Ethical Reasoning course. Prereq: Academic Inquiry Seminar (AIQS).