WGS 201 — Women & Religious Experiences
This course will study the religious and spiritual writings of women from a diversity of faiths and from many time periods to explore the ways in which women have subscribed to, challenged, subverted, reinterpreted, and sought to change patriarchal religious narratives. Have women been the passive, dominated subjects of religion? Has religion and spirituality offered a venue for access to power for women? Does religion reinforce patriarchal power structures or provide a space to rupture them? How do spiritual texts connect to other aspects of society- gender, sexuality, politics, class, family? If they connect, how do spiritual and religious texts impact these other realms of society? The course will seek answers to these questions by exploring three central concepts: Representations of the divine, the speech silence dichotomy, and politics and power.