Syllabus: Sex Wars: Religion and Gender in the Public Sphere

This syllabus by Siobhan Kelly is an honorable mention of the LGBTQ Religious Archive Network’s Educational Resource Prize in 2024.

Course Description

Religious traditions have always had a lot to say about sex, gender, and sexuality—be it eunuchs under Roman rule or reproductive autonomy in the US today. Many heated and long-standing public debates take place at this very intersection. While we tend to imagine religion as inherently sex, religious communities have diverse and diverging approaches to sex and sexuality. In this course, we turn to “Sex Wars” in the public imagination, including but not limited to: abortion, miscegenation, gay marriage, sodomy, contraception, trans life, child and sexual abuse, consent, and the AIDS crisis. Using resources from religious studies and gender studies, we will investigate the way such public debates appear and recur, deepening our understanding of the relationship between religion, racialized gender, and public discourse, and developing tools to both research on and intervene in these ongoing debates.

Why Take It?

Think about how many times a day you see hotly-contested debates about, gender, and sexuality unfolding—on TV, in movies, on social media, at the family dinner table, and more. While we are not always prompted to think of these topics as intricately intertwined, they are—and once you start looking, you can see it everyone. This course will teach you what you are looking at, how to talk about it, and focus your attention on intervening into long-standing public and private debates on these topics. Especially true when thinking about topics that are so close to home for so many, thinking and talking about religion, gender, and sexuality is not easy, and we may often be expected not to talk about this. Here, we will practice talking about these issues respectfully and convincingly, ready to make a difference in conversations about topics that impact how we live, love, work, and communicate.

Learning Goals

This course aims to provide students with a critical understanding of the relationships between religion, gender, and sexuality that emerge as key touchpoints in public discourse. We will learn through close reading; discursive, rhetorical and visual analysis; and class discussions of canonical and emerging works on gender, sexuality, and religion from fields including religious studies, queer and trans studies, Black studies, feminist thought, sociology, anthropology, and popular cultural material. In addition to learning key information on the history, formation, and current state of debates about religion, gender, and sexuality—and particularly how race, gender, and sexuality all interact with religion in public debates—students will develop their analytical writing and argumentative skills, the ability to write convincingly for public audiences, and how to make sense of the discourses of religion and sex that surround us.

Contents

Course Syllabus