Gendering the Divine in Indian and South Asian Religions

Catalog description

Throughout South Asia, ancient religious beliefs and cultural traditions interact with forms of modernity that constitute the daily lives and practices of women and men today. Focusing on conceptualizations of sex and gender over South Asia's long history, this course investigates the ways in which religious traditions and cosmologies have informed gender roles and hierarchies in India, Nepal, and other neighboring nations from the ancient period through the present day. In so doing, the course also explores how political realities-revolutions, terrorism, elections, nationalist movements, for example-can both exploit and challenge the gendered entanglements of religion and secular life. Students engage basic historical methods as well as feminist analytical methods (e.g., intersectionality) as they read a variety of cultural histories and ethnographies, as well as religious, philosophical and literary texts.