01:090:293:H1
Index#: 10618
Professor Dugan McGinley (Religion)
Wednesday 10:20 AM - 1:20 PM
College Avenue
German House (GH) 103
This honors seminar is built around the theme of queerness and religion. While the typical perception is that the relationship between the two is fraught, the reality is, of course, much more complicated, and that is what this course will address. I want to circle around what it means to be “queer” when the very notion of queerness problematizes the notion of fixed identities. This would include sexual, gender, and religious identities. The idea is to open up these categories to reveal the fluidity and possibility behind of each of them. Unsurprisingly, it is at the intersection of these categories where we find the most fruitful analysis.
Rather than approaching this subject through a conventional (and increasingly problematic) “world religions” lens, whereby we presume to assess what various religions have to say about LGBTQ+ people, I want to follow the lead of Melissa Wilcox whose well-regarded book Queer Religiosities (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021) will be used as the template and primary text of this course. Wilcox focuses on the following topics that function across various religions: stories, conversations, practices, identities, communities, politics and power. We will focus on the way queer people engage with(in) each of these categories, ranging from embrace to resistance, revealing a multiplicity of strategies that cut across religious boundaries.
Coming at this as a scholar of religion (already an interdisciplinary field), I am most interested in the lived experiences of queer people in religion(s). This has been the foundation of my own work on gay Catholics. Doctrines, traditions, scripture, and ethics do not emerge in a vacuum; they are developed in “conversation” with what people come to learn in their everyday lives. Thus, storytelling will be an integral part of this course, both refining our own and listening to others’ (with appropriate space given for privacy). We will use readings in autobiography theory to consider how our own sexual-gender-religious stories are shaped by various external factors. I will supplement this with short readings on gender and sexuality theory.
