College Seminar (101-7-21)
Topic
Queer Religion
Instructors
Ashley Helen-Louise King
Meeting Info
Shepard Hall Classroom B05: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM
Overview of class
About half of LGBTQ+ Americans identify as religious, though their stories may be less familiar to us than stories of religious oppression and acrimony. Today, conservative religious institutions lead the opposition to LGBTQ+ rights and provide the public framework for discrimination against queer people. Is religion homophobic and transphobic? Does it have to be?
This course explores how queer religious people in America, past and present, have made sense of their lives as queer and religious. We will ask how religion has shaped queer people's self-understanding as queer, and how queerness has shaped their understanding of faith through their stories of coming out, conversion, transition, diaspora, desire, loss, and healing from spiritual trauma. We will identify the many contributions queer people have made to American religious history—sometimes while hiding their rainbow under a bushel.
Course materials comprise multiple genres of academic writing (history, theory, theology, ethnography, and cultural criticism) and popular media (memoir, fiction, film, podcasts, music, and social media), drawn from Native American religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Haitian Vodou, and New Age spiritualities like tarot and astrology. Instruction will focus on developing critical thinking, reading, and writing skills through familiarizing first year students with basic research methods and strategies designed to prepare them for college-level research in any humanities field.
Learning Objectives
In addition to the standard learning objectives for college seminars, students will:
1. Become familiar with a variety of university resources;
2. Gain experience in expressing arguments in writing and speech by employing appropriate evidence;
3. Employ multiple academic methods to study queer religion, including historical, textual, phenomenological, and lived religion approaches to describe the complexity of religions, genders, and sexualities;
4. Evaluate how religions, genders, and sexualities change over time;
5. Advance essential critical thinking and writing skills by undertaking an original, college-level research project
Teaching Method
Class Attributes
WCAS College Seminar