Course Description
Summary
“Batter my heart, transgender’d god”
—Meg Day
In this course, we will be reading and writing through work treating spirituality by trans and nonbinary writers. We will read writers from a variety of religious traditions and practices (including atheism), with varying degrees of orthodoxy or heterodoxy. As we do, we will let questions like, “What is the relationship of trans experience to spirituality?” and “How have trans writers used literature to articulate their spiritual experiences?” and “How do our own experiences of gender and spirituality influence our reading?” guide us. Another guiding question: how to thoughtfully and responsibly engage with writers of diverse genders from outside Eurocentric concepts of gender without imposing those concepts? Yet another: what happens when we engage in a critical or scholarly way with a body of work created by people who may share aspects of our own identities?
We will also engage with a variety of forms, from the creative (poetry, fiction, etc.) to the scholarly. We will read work from the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality, as well as selections from books such as ZOM-FAM, in which Kama La Mackerel, “mythologizes a queer/trans narrative of and for their home island, Mauritius,” Joy Ladin’s a Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, and The(y)ology by Max Yeshaye Blumberg-Kraus. For a more canonical perspective on trans spirituality, we’ll check out what TSQ (Trans Studies Quarterly, the Trans Studies journal of record) and The Routledge Handbook of Trans Literature have to say on the subject.
Since spiritual practices encompass the ritual as well as the textual, we’ll draw on Jailbreaking the Goddess: a Radical Revisioning of Feminist Spirituality by Lasara Firefox Allen as a way to think about the nuts and bolts of transforming (or creating!) ritual practice and language to encompass the spiritual needs of trans people.
Special Topics in Trans Lit: Spirituality will consist of conversations shaped by close readings of the texts, weekly reading responses, a presentation on one of the readings, and will culminate in a final essay.
