Religion and the Body . RG ST 200BD
The seminar explores the contributions of scholarship on the body in religion to re-visioning theories of the body from the methodological perspective of the history of religions. We will examine three areas of scholarship that have had a significant influence on contemporary theories: the body in philosophy, the body in social theory, and the body in feminist and gender studies. We will critically interrogate the limitations of these Western theoretical models through an analysis of categories and models of the body that are grounded in the distinctive idioms of non-Western religious traditions, with a focus on six modalities: ritual bodies, ascetic bodies, gendered bodies, sexual bodies, tantric bodies, and devotional bodies.
No Prerequisites
4
UnitsLetter
Grading1, 2, 3
PasstimeGraduate students only
Level LimitLetters and science
College
Lecture
Enrollment Trends
Rate My Professors
46
3.4
I took several classes with holdrege about 30 years ago. To this day, I find her material to be not only fascinating but life changing. Religious studies was my major so I can understand why others might not see the beauty in it but learn it anyway. The mastery she has in such a obscure area will make you a hit at cocktail parties down the road.
There were only three things graded and one was attendance and participation. She is very knowledgable on the topic, but is extremely unorganized and 90% of the readings are her own. Also, is very inconsiderate of her students time as she never finished lectures on time and schedules review sessions during finals that don't end until 10pm.
The material of this course is fine. My complaint is that the flow of the course and the way things are assigned makes me want to drop out. A 10 page midterm with the prompt posted a week before?? We have an assignment due in 3 days at midnight and the prompt is nowhere to be found. There's no upload link for hw due tomorrow. Some of us have lives!
Professor Holdrege was super caring and addressed a lot of the concerns I had throughout the quarter. The material is interesting and she is clearly very passionate about it. Lectures were sometimes slow, but very informative. Grade really depends on your TA. You have to put work into the online assignments and essays, so not the easiest GE.
She seems nice enough i guess but the course i took with her was a complete nightmare. Terrible lecturer and organizational skills, the flow of the class made no sense, no feedback or grades to go off of. This was a gigantic waste of time and i feel DUMBER for having taken a course with this clueless professor.
Cannot describe how much this professor infuriated me the entire quarter. I understand that we spent this quarter in a pandemic, but if that gives students no excuse, it gives her no excuse either. 10 page essay due in one week. During global outrage. 200+ pages of reading a week. Lectures always late. Pure disregard for our time and mental health.
Janet Afary
3.6