RSO 520 - Gender, Women, and Culture (3)

This seminar focuses on the intertwining of gender, women, and religion, gendered visions of power and understanding of the human body as mythic, symbolic, and ritual phenomena, from a womanist perspective. Central to our discourse is who gets to speak, and how they know the so-called “natural” order and “proper” roles of women and men. This course explores methods, sources, and conceptual frameworks of the ways religion reflects and molds gender roles and hierarchies in society, and the ways political and economic conditions influence these configurations, the course problematizes terms “female,” “woman,” “male,” “man,” and “sexual differences” in scripture and culture. Central to this conversation are the experiences of LGBQIT persons. We trace women’s participation in western Christian religion, male hierarchical ecclesiastical reactions, and related theological interpretations from the early church to the present, especially of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.Required texts represent various womanist, feminist, anthropological and critical theories, and a range of culturally-based texts, including music, literature, and popular culture. We critique our own internalized cultural and socioeconomic “rules” and “practices,” and pursue gender and multicultural perspectives that affirm respect for diversity. The course pays particular attention to black women’s and black men’s experiences of ecclesial power, marginalization, and cultural repression, and given sexism classism, racism, heterosexism, and ableism, reflecting on tensions between lived reality and the eschatological hope for embracing the beloved community. This course reviews how the Church has been theologically understood over time in dialogue with current social problems and the ways the Church should meet them. Social reforms are briefly traced, along with problems regarding housing and family life, delinquency and crime, public education, commercialized recreation, and the broader uses of leisure and studies to discover avenues of Church cooperation with local agencies in solving these problems. By exploring sociological and ethical approaches, students will better understand the social nature and mission of the Church. We explore the value and limits or traditional “social justice” language, leader to a broader understanding of the Church in context of modern culture.