Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual teachers’ negotiations of civil partnership and schools: ambivalent attachments to religion and secularism

ABSTRACT

As legal structures for same-sex relationships are introduced in many contexts, the politics of sexuality are negotiated along religious/secular lines. Religious and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBT-Q) rights are pitted against one another such that LGBT-Q lives often assumed to be secular. Schools are crucibles of intermingling religious, secular and equality discourses and this complexity is carefully negotiated by LGBT-Q teachers in their everyday lives. Drawing on a study with LGB teachers as they entered into a Civil Partnership in Ireland (a legal structure in place for five years prior to enactment of Marriage Equality in 2015), this paper captures a ‘structure of feeling’ – new cultural work done as sexuality norms were in a state of flux. The teachers’ accounts unravel the religious/secular binary and provide insight of universal interest into the ambivalent, messy ways in which the politics of sexuality are (re)negotiated across the overlapping social fields of religion and education.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil partnership/same-sex marriage
• lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer
• teachers
• religion
• secularism
• structure of feeling
• cultural legitimacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The participants in this study identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual. Throughout this paper, we use the term LGBT-Q to grapple with the politics of gender and sexuality and the dash is a continuous reminder of the silences and tensions that abound in the politics of identity and representation.

2. Multi-denominational primary schools are predominantly run by a non-profit company called ‘Educate Together’. Unlike Catholic primary schools who operate a faith formation approach within the school day, the multi-denominational schools have an ethics curriculum called ‘Learn Together’ which educates about a variety of religions.

3. Section 37 (1) of the Employment Equality Act stated that an organisation was not deemed as discriminatory if it gave more favourable treatment or took action against an employee or prospective employee on religion grounds in order to maintain the ethos of the institution. This was amended by the Irish government in July 2015 to ensure that no religious organisation can give less favourable treatment on the grounds of gender, marital status, family status, sexual orientation, religion, age, traveller community, disability grounds or grounds of race.

4. Rule 68 had afforded religion a privileged place over other subjects in the primary school curriculum.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council.