Queer Christianity: Gender and Sexuality in the Church

"I would sit in church and always wonder, 

'In God's eyes, how does he see me?'"

Caitlyn Jenner
20/20 Interview

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Course Description and Outcomes

We live in a historical moment when the relationship between queerness and Christianity is being reconsidered and hotly debated. To better understand this debate, as well as the differences and potential common ground between members of the queer and Christian communities (including those who belong to both!), this seminar examines the history of Christianity and its relationship to queerness. Is Christianity a force for domination or liberation? Orthodoxy or creative multiplicity? Normativity or queerness? To answer these questions, we will read literature that explores how Christianity has both suppressed and in some sense created queerness, as well as how it has been reclaimed by queer communities. We will also look closely at how these historical tensions are being played out locally today. Special attention also will be given to the range of intersecting identities and communities that have responded to the meeting of faith and sexuality in various ways, drawing from diverse contexts of race, ability/disability, gender, and class. Readings include selections from the Bible, books about theology, and documentaries and memoirs attesting to the experience of LGBT Christians.

Course Objectives (Reflecting SAGES Learning Outcomes)

By the end of the course you will be able to T.E.A.C.H. on a range of ethical, historical, and aesthetic subjects:

• THINK critically on the rhetorical and ethical value of cultural narratives 
• ENGAGE respectfully across perspectives alongside and opposing your own 
• ARGUE dialectically with thesis driven claims that actively engage existing debates 
• COMPOSE collaboratively using evidenced-based research and peer-review 
• HONOR differences with nuance, complexity, and sympathy

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Selections from the Reading List

Queer Christianity is a seminar designed to prompt meditation and discussion on the long history and futures of gender and sexuality in Christianity as it grew, divided, and evolved from western Europe to the Americas. The course readings are more concentrated on fewer texts to allow for more time to dwell with the questions each raise; rather than surveying the already extensive archive on issues of sex and sexuality in the Church. The seminar begins by challenging students to examine multiple readings of key scripture passages that are commonly invoked in bible-based arguments on LGBTQI issues. The seminar then moves into debating a few representative premodern theologians (Augustine, Aquinas, and Paul) as well as theologies of sex emerging from the LGBTQI, women's, and civil rights movements. Christianity is often called the religion of love, using the word in a host of divergent and even contradicting ways. This prompts the section of the seminar on queering love, where students will read C.S. Lewis's reflection on the four Greek words for love and interrogate the ways that the Church has failed to extend and recognize these forms of love to and with queer communities. The next section introduces a series of films on the culture wars in the United States and abroad wherein Christianity has been a force aimed at converting, fixing, and eliminating the LGBTQI population. The seminar ends with consideration of the LGBTQI saints already a part of the official Church record as well as those persons who have become saints within the wider queer family.

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Queer Scripture 

NRSV Bible, “Genesis 1 and Genesis 2” 

NRSV Bible, “Leviticus 18-21” and “Deuteronomy 22-25” 

NRSV Bible, “Genesis 18-19,” “Isaiah 56” and “Matthew 18-19” 

NRSV Bible, “Song of Songs” (All)

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Queer Theology 

St. Augustine of Hippo, the Confessions, Book 1-2 

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Selections 

St. Paul, The NRSV Bible, Colossians 3, Ephesians 5, Galatians 3 Council 

M. Althaus-Reid, Queer God, Ch. 3: Trinitarians and God the Orgy 

D.J. Lee, Rescuing Jesus, Ch. 8: Femmevangelical 

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, “The Maniac” and “The Eternal Revolution”  

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Queer Love 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, “Storge” 

Lewis, The Four Loves, “Philia” 

Lewis, The Four Loves, “Eros” 

Lewis, The Four Loves, “Agape” 

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Queer Conversions 

Roger Ross Williams, God Loves Uganda (2013) 

Aiken and Aparicio (dir.), The Transformation (1996) 

Daniel G. Karslake, For the Bible Tells Me So (2007) Council 

P.R. Lightsey, Our Lives Matter, Queer Black Women’s Lives 

Lightsey, Our Lives Matter, Transforming Until Kin(g)dom Come

Lightsey, Our Lives Matter, The Biblical Crisis 

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Queer Saints 

N. Constas (Trans.), The Life of Saint Marinos 

The Life of St. Joan of Arc

D.W. Cross, Pope Joan, Ch. 11 “Joan,” and Ch. 14-18 “Brother John” 

Cross, Pope Joan, Ch. 27-29 “Pope Joan,” and Author’s Note

L. Alcorn, Transgender Queen of Hell 

C. Jenner, I Am Cait, “A New Beginning” 

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Beyond Male and Female: How (Not) to Argue On the Internet

“The importance of the Internet for LGBT youth and their peers overall... poses a challenge to educators, 
who must help students learn how to seek out and identify reliable sources of information and safe sources of support amidst the deluge of potential connections online.”

Out Online
GLSEN

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Course Description and Outcomes

Gender is personal and political. Gender is not just a set of physical or mental characteristics but an ongoing social conversation between identities, expressions, and relations that fight to order how we define bodies, how we divide bodies, and what roles or values these bodies will possess. Histories and narratives form and repeat when readers follow debates on gender in society. Such narratives influence cultural imagination with tales that reflect and resist public concepts of gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, and class. In this seminar, we explore how rhetoric and worldviews have worked together to form diverse genres of texts and embodiment that have come to be collected under the name, “transgender,” as well as other forms of gender beyond the binary categories of “male” and “female.”


Course Objectives (Reflecting SAGES Learning Outcomes)

By the end of the course you will be able to T.E.A.C.H. on a range of ethical, historical, and aesthetic subjects:

• THINK critically on the rhetorical and ethical value of cultural narratives 
• ENGAGE respectfully across perspectives alongside and opposing your own 
• ARGUE dialectically with thesis driven claims that actively engage existing debates 
• COMPOSE collaboratively using evidenced-based research and peer-review 
• HONOR differences with nuance, complexity, and sympathy

Sections of the seminar will use (public) Twitter posts in place of Canvas posts. The length of posts should be approximately the same, requiring multiple posts.

Twitter: Create a unique Twitter account for the seminar (unrelated to your name). Be aware that Twitter is an open platform, meaning the safety and respect lessons on the seminar on “How (Not) to Argue on the Internet” will need to be practiced.

Hashtags for Twitter: 

#USSO291T (Seminar) + Section Title (e.g. #Science)

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Selections from the Reading List

Beyond Male and Female: How (Not) to Argue on the Internet is a seminar designed to interrogate the systems which continually reduce gendered embodiment to a binary and the alternative networks which are developing online. The first half of the seminar explores #Religion and #Science as practices of knowing that organize and often limit gender diversity. In the former sub-section, the class practices close-reading texts by creating their own biblical commentaries of key passages on gender and sexuality from the NRSV Bible and analyzing images, memes, and videos in the long tradition of trans and non-binary saints. In the latter, the science of sex is researched through medical histories and intersex memoirs to consider the material evidence of over 50 distinct sexual embodiments. The second half of the seminar is rooted in two critical spaces where the gender binary is enforced or undermined, #Healthcare and #Schools. In the former, students will read embodiment narratives that address different ways that gender dysphoria manifests and is managed in distinct environments: high school, hospitals, prisons, and on the streets. In the last subsections, the class concludes by looking back at how education systems help or hinder trans and non-binary youths through the autobiographic stories including Eli Clare and Jazz Jennings. Throughout the semester, in addition to traditional reading assignments, students will be encountering a variety of digital texts which will augment and model the ways in which the internet argues over men, women, and all those between and beyond.

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#Religion

Print Texts

The NRSV Bible,

• “Genesis I and II,” 
• “Deuteronomy,”
•  “Galatians 3” 
• “Leviticus 21-23,” 
• “Isaiah 56,”
• “Matthew 18-19”

Aiken and Aparicio (dir.), The Transformation (1996)

N. Constas (Trans.), The Life of Saint Marinos

C. Jenner, I Am Cait, “A New Beginning”

Digital Texts

Week 1: Youtube, AustenLionheart, “Reimagining Genesis 1”

Week 2: Youtube, AustenLionheart, “Eunuchs, Prophets, and Coming Home”

Week 3: Youtube, Michael Kasino, “The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson”

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#Science

Print Texts

T. Hillman, Intersex, 

• “Haircut,” 
• “Special,” 
• “Pray,” 
• “Reshaping” 
• “Another,” 
• “Swallow,” 
• “Testosterone”
• “Condition”

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

A. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body

L. Simon, Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite

Digital Texts

Week 4: Youtube, Boldly, “What It’s Like to Be Intersex” 

Week 5: Youtube, Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF, Exploring Intersex w Hida Viloria

Week 6: Podcast, Transgeneral, “Non-Binary 101” (2/5/16)

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#Healthcare

Print Texts

A.P.A, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), “Gender Dysphoria”

Scholinski, The Last Time I Wore A Dress, Ch. 1-5

K.A. Applegate, Animorphs #3: The Encounter 

J. Mock, Redefining Realness

Orange is the New Black, 1.5. “The Chickening.” (2013)

A. Belkin, New England Journal of Medicine, “Caring for Our Trans Troops”

Digital Texts

Week 7: Podcast, The Gender Rebels Podcast, “Am I Transgender Enough?”

Week 8: Youtube, College Humor, “Coming Out as Trans Everything”

Week 9: Youtube, ATME e.V., “Janet Mock @ Women’s March” 

Week 10: Youtube, MTV, “Lavern Cox Presents: The T Word” 

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#Schools

Print Texts

E. Clare, Exile and Pride

L. Alcorn, Transgender Queen of Hell

A. Cavalcante, Critical Studies in Media, “I Did It All Online”

J. Jennings, I Am Jazz (Book)

J. Jennings, Being Jazz (Book), Ch. 5 

J. Jennings, I Am Jazz (TV Show), “I Looked Like a Man in a Dress”

Digital Texts

Week 11: Youtube, UNHCOLA, Notes on Cure, Disability and Natural Worlds

Week 12: Youtube, lacigreen, “Pray the Gay Away - Exposed”

Week 13: Youtube, tic uk, “Jazz Debates Tomi Lahren!” 

Week 14: Podcast, How To Be a Girl, “Episode 1: Mama, I’m a Girl!” (2013)             

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