LAUSR

This paper examines some of the challenges and opportunities for “queering the [religion] curriculum” in the context of an interdisciplinary course. I reflect critically on the experience of teaching a wide-ranging seminar-based Master’s course in religion and gender with successive groups of students from different disciplinary backgrounds. I focus on two issues: first the connection between interdisciplinarity and the queering of the curriculum, and second the implications of this for teaching queer perspectives in Christian theology specifically (using the example of the work of Marcella Althaus-Reid). The seminar is characterised and used by students as a space in which disciplinary “silences”, around religion as well as around gender, can be broken, and in which different disciplinary schemes for categorisation become mutually destabilising. In this paper, reflecting on the experience of teaching a specific Master’s level course in religion and gender, I examine the connections between interdisciplinarity, queering the curriculum, and the ambiguous or ambivalent placing of theology within the university curriculum. The teaching practices and experiences recounted here have developed organically over several years, in a highly collaborative teaching process in which course and even seminar design have rarely been the sole responsibility of any member of academic staff– and in which the boundaries between student and staff groups have themselves not always been obvious, with senior graduate students presenting seminars and on one occasion an invited outside “expert” becoming a student. 1 The ‘queering of the curriculum’ recounted here is thus not a deliberate policy but rather an accidental process discovered in retrospect.