Feeling Sexuality Education: Teachers’ Learning About Homophobia and Affective Agency

• In Event: The Affective Turn, Sexuality, and Curriculum Studies

Abstract

In this paper I focus on homophobia in the sexuality education classroom. Homophobia receives much attention in the policies, practices and research of sexuality education (Curran et al 2009; Ollis, 2010; Rogers et al, 2009). However, homophobic feelings are often constructed as straightforwardly problematic and the pedagogical and curricular response is to develop and implement strategies that might help students and teachers to become less homophobic. For instance, in their paper on tackling homophobia in high school classrooms, Zack, Mannheim and Alfano exemplify the position that homophobia is a problem that needs to be challenged by high school teachers and can be cured by educating attitudes. They argue that the importance of “nurturing pluralistic dispositions concerning sexual identity in beginning educators….[so that] young educators can effectively challenging homophobic rhetoric and behaviors wherever and whenever they occur. Only then can public schools begin to transform the homophobic and heteronormative attitudes that perpetuate hate and derision. (Zack et al, 2010, p. 110). Zack et al then go on to identify four basic archetypes for understanding the transition from homophobia to tolerance: avoiders, hesitators, confronters, and integrators. Teachers who are hesitators or avoiders are seen as ineffective in the battle against homophobia, while those who would confront and address anti-homosexual attitudes are lauded as effective educators.
I want to argue that this approach does not operate to nurture pluralistic dispositions concerning sexual identity in educators. Focusing on the religiously and culturally diverse space of Australian public education, I draw on Ann Pellegrini’s (2009) article “Feeling Secular,” to consider the role that homophobia plays in structuring feeling in the sexuality education classroom. Pellegrini focuses on affect and religion that is understood as fundamentalist. She considers how an academy that is strongly influenced by secular political and epistemological commitments might productively engage with “feelings coded as ‘religious.’” One avenue for doing this is to examine what she terms “queer structures of religious feeling” (p. 205). Drawing on Raymond Williams theorizing of “structures of feeling,” Pellegrini considers the habits of thought that “separate the social from the personal … [and argues] many committed secularists can value religion as a deeply personal matter even as they think religion should be bracketed or at least minimized from political debates in the public square” (p. 211). Pellegrini’s framing of the conflict between feelings of secularism and religiosity has great import for understanding the tensions of addressing homophobia within and outside the frame of sexuality education in the context of public schooling. Homophobia is, in part, “a structure of feeling.” And those feelings, made and articulated at the intersection of public and private realms of experience, complicate our educational wish that homophobia could be eradicated through rational persuasion. I consider how one might instruct teachers on the role of their own affect in conversations about homophobia. What are the bounds and limits of affect when one is discussing homophobia? How is affective agency imagined, constrained and enabled when addressing homophobia in a religiously and culturally diverse public education?

Author

• Mary Louise Rasmussen, Monash University