studying religion and sexuality
This class, as it turns out, was a bit ambitious -- it met right before the Puddle Jump. So of my three students, one skipped, one stared so longingly out the window that I finally let her out with a writing assignment, and one (a first year) insisted on staying anyway because she had struggled with the readings.
They wanted to talk about my piece first (fair, since it was definitely the easier of the two). Discussion questions: how do we define sex? How do we study sex in the context of religion? That went fairly smoothly, but they really struggled with the Fessenden and Cady piece.
We read the introduction to Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference, which honestly I think I could design a class around. It took us longer to get through my first question (what assumptions do the authors say westerners make about secularism?) than I anticipated, but we got there eventually. The other two--how are the authors pushing back against these assumptions, and why do they feel their project is timely?--went more quickly, but were still a bit of a struggle. I'm not sure if the students were having a hard time with the reading itself (though I didn't think the language was particularly challenging) or just with paying attention while undergrads dressed like superheroes and carrying torches ran by the window on their way to jump in the pond. Readings
Cady and Fessenden, “Gendering the Divide”
Goodwin, “Thinking Sex and American Religions”
Keywords
Secularization thesis
Oversignification
“moral narrative of modernity”
intersectionality