Session tba
Building local identities through international metaphors: the case of gay subcultures in Spain
Alberto Bustos Plaza
Experiencing identity: policy, regulation and sexuality
Dr Heather Shipley
Heather’s presentation offered a Canadian case study regarding the relationship of religion, gender and sexuality in policy and discourse.
Contrary to the assumption that religion only ever opposes gender or sexual diversity, I argued that religion and religious identity is in need of the same critical deconstruction that is put forward by gender and sexual identity theories.
Leaving religion in an unexamined state reinforces inaccuracies about the fluidity of religious identity, and also worryingly ignores non-religious forms of discrimination, such as those evidenced in the policies discussed – sex education, health and the resistance to adopting equality principles as outlined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Dr Shipley uses media debates to demonstrate the reinforcing tactics deployed when religion is framed as the only form of discrimination regarding sexuality or gender.
Issues of gender and sexuality in a Brazilian school: changes and exclusion processes
Ana Cristina Leal Moreira Lima and Vera Helena Ferraz de Siqueira
This paper aims at investigating HOW and WHERE issues about gender and sexuality appears and are conducted by a Brazilian school.
Ms Lima performed semi-structured interviews with students, and teachers and also observed the school quotidian. Some specific issues were recurrent in the discourses and they appeared explicitly in the observations undertaken: the increased visibility of homosexual or bisexual students as a factor of great mobilization in this school, a great fluidity in student´s sexuality as the students say they are living “the moment” and this moment may be gay, heterosexual or bisexual and the existence of sociability tensions among students with different sexual orientations.
The existence of discrimination and exclusion processes, even if not in an explicit way, has ended up by creating an informal gathering space for those who feel they don’t belong somehow. A side street, about a hundred meters away from the school and which is known by all as the “Fuck it Street”. The meaning is like “I don’t care about anything” were students go to date, drink and gamble.
Ana may be contacted at anamolima@ig.com.br
