Contested Bodies: Religion, Race, and Narrative

3 Credits

What does your body express about who you are and what you believe? How do you perceive your body, and what role do public expectations, social values, and cultural norms play in that perception? With Muslim women as our primary case study, this course asks students to engage with the lived experience of bodies perceived as passive, vulnerable, or even violent in the Western context, and to evaluate their construction of agency. Through engagement with politics, religion, race, and transnational feminism, we will explore how bodies are expressed, contested, subjugated, and violated within various configurations of power and governance. We will encounter personal narratives--and create our own--to understand how bodies also resist the persistent forces that seek to shape their image.