Contemporary, racialised conflicts over LGBT-inclusive education

More strategic secularisms than secular/religious oppositions

Bibliographic Data

ID21314179
AuthorsKarl Kitching (0000-0001-7141-9333, University of Birmingham, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume76
Issue3
Pages506-525
Publication date2024-04-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEducational Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-1911 • E-ISSN: 1465-3397
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00131911.2022.2054959
OpenAlexW4226301355
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited48

This paper analyses public conflicts over school policies that seek to advance Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) equality. It focuses in particular on conflicts where Muslims, who protest LGBT-inclusive policies, become racialised as other to secular national/Western values. Growing attention has been paid to the secular arguments used by majority and minority religious groups to publicly counter LGBT-inclusive education. In this paper, I contend that neither contemporary arguments for, or against, LGBT-inclusive education are neatly secular, i.e., non-religious, in their public appearance. Introducing a Critical Secular approach, I contend multiple parties in such conflicts work with “strategic” secularisms. Strategic secularisms are prevailing discourses which privatise, and deprivatise (make public), aspects of minority religious and sexual identities on neo-colonial, secular Christian terms. I present a thematic analysis of 149 newspaper articles covering protests largely by Muslims against LGBT-inclusive education outside schools in Birmingham, England. The analysis shows that newspapers foregrounded discourses seeking to privatise (assert private authority over) or deprivatise (publicly surveil) Muslim religiosity. LGBT identities were also variously framed as “beliefs” to be kept private, or an essential part of the public self which must be confessed to be “free”. Based on this analysis, I argue public discourse should certainly challenge queer/Muslim and secular/religious dichotomies. But more fundamentally, there is a need to cultivate education publics that refuse strategic secularisms based in neo-colonial, racialised discourses of secular Christian civilisation, and engage the losses created by the privatising and deprivatising of specific forms of minority religious and sexual identity

Lesbian · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Queer · Religious education · Secular education · Secularism · Sociology · Transgender · Gender Studies · Law · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious Education and Schools

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