Educating Tensions: On Religious and Sexuality Discourses

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Faith, Difference, and Socially Just Public Pedagogies

Abstract

What place do religions and sexualities have in teacher education? It is a tenuous question in that religions and sexualities, notably non-heteronormative, have often been pitted against one another, invariably sparking controversy, on their own terms or for one another. Neither religions nor sexualities exist without the specter of controversy, making both a challenge for teacher education and larger questions of freedom. Additionally, religions and sexualities are not monolithic concepts; they are loaded with diverse renderings, understandings, practices, and histories making the work of engaging them challenging, but full of opportunities.

In this paper, we tread lightly into contemplating the place of religions and sexualities in teacher education through the lens of Catholic theology. Religions and sexualities have, to be clear, both been taken up within teacher education scholarship individually and they have at times been addressed together. We draw on some of this scholarship, but move to the side of extant work to look at the place of “theologies,” particularly Catholic theology, makes for engaging “religions” and “sexualities” differently in the work of teacher education in the late 2010s.

Twentieth century US history shows us many instances where religions and sexualities collide at specific moments (e.g., ACT-Ups “Stop the Church” demonstration in 1989) and serve particular purposes in illustrating the material consequences of a religious institution. However, our interest is not in such high-profile instances of activism that frame religion and sexuality as antithetical. Rather, our interest is in the everyday details of teacher education where student-teachers bring into the curriculum beliefs, ideas, and practices rooted in discourses of “religion” and “sexuality” that need to be thought through educatively.

Mary Lou Rasmussen (2016), in her work on secularization and sexuality education calls for attention to “what types of thinking about sexuality have come to be seen as progressive and how this shapes what is constituted as conservative” (p. 2). In particular Rasmussen works to think through the use-value of the narrative of the privatization of religion—as proxy for its decline in the public sphere—for producing a certain kind of story about what it means to be progressive (and, again conservative) about sexuality and/in education. We must do this, she urges, “while grappling with the relationships among secularisms, processes of secularization and sexuality education” (p. 2).

She uses Jakobsen (2002) to argue that the ‘alignment of the queer with the secular and of sexual conservativism with the religious” (Jakobsen, 2002, p. 207-208) may actually reinforce the claims of the right to a monopoly on religion” (p. 208) (all in Rasmussen, p. 8).

In this light, our work here, takes up theological scholarship to suggest different frames for understanding the tensions that arise—and that might be elided or differently engaged—in the midst of sexualities and religions in teacher education. In particular, we turn to contemporary Catholic theological discourses that offer a way into and around educating through tensions of sexualities and religions.

Authors

• Kevin J Burke, University of Georgia - Athens

• Adam Joseph Greteman, School of the Art Institute of Chicago