Young, queer, and Catholic: Youth resistance to homophobia in Catholic schools

ABSTRACT

Drawing from the author's 5-year, multimethod qualitative study, this article argues that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer students in Canadian Catholic schools are not inherently mentally ill, passive victims in need of special Catholic pastoral care; instead, they are activists who strongly resist homophobic oppression in school. This article concentrates on three youth activists, whose stories are analyzed through narrative inquiry and are contextualized in the larger study's methodology. The article concludes that antihomophobia education efforts should not overlook potential student leaders in Catholic schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• Canada
• curriculum
• educational policy
• homophobia
• qualitative research
• schools
• religious
• students
• LGBT

Note

Notes on contributor

Tonya D. Callaghan is the author of the book That's so Gay! Homophobia in Canadian Catholic Schools. She has over ten years teaching experience in national and international, rural and urban, Catholic and non-Catholic environments. Her award-winning doctoral thesis Holy Homophobia: Doctrinal Disciplining of Non-Heterosexuals in Canadian Catholic Schools explores Catholic resistance to anti-homophobia education in both curriculum and educational policy. She is currently an Assistant Professor with the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary.

Notes

1. In Canada, Catholic schools have a long and somewhat complicated history having to do with Britain's victory over France for the colonies of North America in the early 1700s. The two main faith groups at the time were Catholics and Protestants. As a concession to the faith group in a minority position in any given community, a separate school system was established to ensure that Catholic families could send their children to Catholic schools if living in a predominantly Protestant area and vice versa. Publicly funded separate schools currently have constitutional status in the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. These separate schools are operated by civil authorities and are accountable to provincial governments rather than church authorities. Religious bodies do not have a constitutional or legal interest in separate schools and, as such, Canadian Catholic separate schools are not private or parochial schools as is common in other countries.