Gender and sexuality are historically fluid and a transformative categories as social expectations, roles, attitudes, behaviors, identities, ideas of masculinity and femininity and how they get deployed in religious discourses have changed over time and are continually evolving.
This specialization focuses on the ways that gender identity and sexual expression shape religious traditions, rituals, and practices in the Americas and in cultures throughout the world. Faculty within this specialization use gender as a theoretical lens and an analytical category, that is to say they understand that gender-based analyses of religion can lead to a more nuanced understanding of how religion operates in our day-to-day lives and how women and men experience religious life differently. As an analytical category, gender shows us the uneven and sometimes unequal ways in which women and men in different parts of the world interpret and engage with religious proscriptions, texts, rituals, ideas, values, beliefs, and practices.
While situated within the discipline of religion, the specialization in gender and sexuality is interdisciplinary by design. Faculty in this area are affiliated with and collaborate with the Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Research, the Center for Global Islamic Studies, the Bud Shorstein Center for Jewish Studies, and the Center for the Study of Hindu Traditions.
Faculty
Anna Peterson
Ali Altaf Mian
Anita Anantharam
Vasudha Narayanan
Rachel Gordan
Robert Kawashima