REL 264
Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities in the Early Christian World
Last Offered Fall 2018
Division II Difference, Power, and Equity
Cross-listed WGSS 264
This course is not offered in the current catalog

What does it mean to be a woman or a man? To have body? A gender? A sexuality? In this course we will explore the ways in which bodies, genders,and sexualities were experienced and described in Mediterranean antiquity. Ancient experiences of and ideas about bodies, genders, and sexualitieswere often very different than those of the contemporary world. Nevertheless, because Greek and Roman antiquity and Christian beginnings oftenfunction as the imagined origins of “Western” (or European and American) “civilization,” these ancient ideas about bodies, genders, and sexuality,maintain an out-sized presence in current debates about the “normal” body, gender practices, and the contour of sexuality. With a focus on earlyChristianity, the course seeks, on the one hand, to introduce students to the early history of Christianity through an inspection of its pluriformdiscourses on the meaning and regulation of bodies, genders, and sexuality, even as it keeps an eye toward the modern legacy of these ideas. On theother hand, the course gives students the opportunity to be introduced to key questions and theories in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studiesthrough the study of early Christianity and its environs