Bodies, Sex & Religion

Catalog description

This class investigates how religion shapes understandings of bodies and sex, and in turn how embodied, gendered, and queer subject positions inform religious experience. The class will begin by establishing foundational concepts of the self, body, and sexuality and investigate various understandings of religion. We will engage a range of literature from religious studies, anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, and history to interrogate assumptions that women, queer, and gender non-conforming people are necessarily marginalized by religious institutions, cosmologies, and traditions. Overall, we will investigate the ways that religion can be a site where ideas about gender and sexuality can be simultaneously imposed, performed, contested, and creatively reimagined.