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Homophobia in Catholic Schools of Canada and Australia: A Comparison of Teachers' Rights and Experiences
This paper examines the religiosity, sexuality, and attitudes towards same-sex relationships among young people who were students at religiously affiliated schools in Australia and the staff who work in these schools, drawing on a national representative survey. It demonstrates that students are increasingly nonreligious, and accepting of alternatively sexualities, and increasingly identify as lesbian, gay, and bisexual. The religiosity of staff has changed less, but teachers have become increasingly accepting of alternative sexualities. These changes are important because they present a very different picture of religiously affiliated education to that portrayed by the conservative religious authorities who shape the policies and practices in these schools. Conservative Christian church leaders are using discursive practices of religious freedom to support governmental techniques and institutional privilege within religiously affiliated educational contexts to constitute conservative sexual subjectivities among the general Australian public who work in and attend these schools.
This article addresses a gap in research on LGBTQ inclusion in Catholic schools that has largely been silent on the experiences of non-heterosexual Catholic teachers. I consider how Judith Butler’s conception of precarity sheds light on the complex positionality of LGBTQ Catholic (religious) educators in the heteronormative setting of Catholic schools. This precarity, I argue, ought to provoke us to reclaim an incarnational theology of teaching as a call, which counters a restrictive language of ministerial identity that has been used against them to maintain the heteronormative ecclesial discourse on sexuality in the Catholic church.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) teachers are a marginalised group that historically have been absent from research on sexuality and schooling. Rather, much research in the field has focused upon the experiences of same sex attracted and increasingly, gender diverse young people in schools, as well as the delivery of sexuality education. Up until recently, very little research has been carried out that explicitly addresses the experiences of LGBTQ teachers, particularly within the Australian context. This article focuses upon key issues arising from the semi-structured interviews that the Out/In Front team carried out as part of a pilot study that took place between April and July 2013 in the state of Victoria, Australia. We interviewed nine current or former teachers working within primary and secondary education across the public, Catholic and private sectors. This paper focuses upon the notion that LGBTQ teachers exist within a ‘space of exclusion’ that is dominated by discursive mechanisms that (re)produce heteronormativity. We also argue that the Victorian policy context – as well as increasing socio-political tolerance for LGBTQ people within Australia – enables LGBT teachers to interrupt the discursive frameworks within which their professional lives are situated.
This article, based on the author's doctoral research, examines the ways in which some religious schools in New South Wales (NSW), via institutional practices, maintain and perpetuate discrimination in relation to lesbian teachers and lesbian sexualities. These institutional practices, which included threats of dismissal, forced resignations, implicit harassment, monitoring and surveillance, curriculum silences, and censorship, silence lesbian sexualities and impact the teacher's daily operations and freedom of speech. Vicarious witnessing of these forms of punishment (in the Foucauldian sense) further ensures the silencing of lesbian identities. Moreover, statewide anti-discrimination legislation, which excludes some private institutions from compliance in the area of sexuality, serves to reinforce discriminatory practices, and ultimately silenced the various violence perpetuated against many of the participants in this research.
This paper explores how some schooling cultures in New South Wales (hereafter NSW), Australia, police and silence non‐heterosexuality through a number of institutional processes which enable homophobia and heterosexism to flourish, while normalizing and constituting heterosexuality as the dominant and only valid sexuality. The discussion shows that despite an apparent broader societal ‘tolerance’ for non‐heterosexuality, as well as legislation that condemns anti‐‘homosexual’ discrimination in education in NSW, homophobic prejudice — often in the form of silence, omission and assumption — prevails. It illustrates that schools need to be much more aware and proactive in addressing issues pertaining to this social justice issue to ensure a safe and equitable learning and teaching environment for all members of the school community. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. (Foucault, 197816.
Foucault , M. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An introduction, Edited by:
Hurley , R. New York, NY: Vintage. View all references, p. 27) Lying is done with words, and also with silence. (Rich, 198036.
Rich , A. 1980/84. On lies, secrets and silence. Selected prose 1966–1978, London: Virago. View all references/84, p.186)
Arguments are put forward in this paper in favour of research which has as its aim the finding and systematizing of forms of thought in terms of which people interpret significant aspects of reality. The kind of research argued for is complementary to other kinds of research; it aims at description, analysis and understanding of experiences. The relatively distinct field of inquiry indicated by such an orientation is labelled phenomenography.
A fundamental distinction is made between two perspectives. From the first-order perspective we aim at describing various aspects of the world and from the second-order perspective (for which a case is made in this paper) we aim at describing people's experience of various aspects of the world.
Research in a variety of disciplines, sub-disciplines and “schools of thought” has provided us with experiential descriptions, that is, content-oriented and interpretative descriptions of the qualitatively different ways in which people perceive and understand their reality. It has, however, seldom been recognized that these various research efforts share a common perspective in their view of phenomena and a unifying scientific identity has in consequence not been attained. The focussing on the apprehended (experienced, conceptualized,) content as a point of departure for carrying out research and as a basis for integrating the findings is seen as the most distinctive feature of the domain indicated.
Conceptions and ways of understanding are not seen as individual qualities. Conceptions of reality are considered rather as categories of description to be used in facilitating the grasp of concrete cases of human functioning. Since the same categories of description appear in different situations, the set of categories is thus stable and generalizable between the situations even if individuals move from one category to another on different occasions. The totality of such categories of description denotes a kind of collective intellect, an evolutionary tool in continual development.
That's so gay: Homophobia in Canadian Catholic schools
- T D Callaghan
Callaghan, T. D. (2007). That's so gay: Homophobia in Canadian Catholic schools.
Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller.