Negotiating queer and religious identities in higher education: queering ‘progression’ in the ‘university experience’

Abstract

This paper addresses the negotiation of 'queer religious' student identities in UK Higher Education. The 'university experience' has generally been characterised as a period of intense transformation and self-exploration, with complex and overlapping personal and social influences significantly shaping educational spaces, subjects and subjectivities. Engaging with ideas about progressive tolerance and becoming, often contrasted against 'backwards' religious-homophobia as a sentiment/space/subject sexual-religious subjects to negotiate identities more freely, albeit with ongoingconstraints. Yet perceptions of what, where and who, is deemed 'progressive' and 'backwards' with regard to sexuality and religion need to be met with caution, where the 'university experience' can shape and shake sexual-religious identity.

Students’ Constructions of a Christian Future: Faith, Class and Aspiration in University Contexts

“…They also position themselves as divergent from the 'progressive' image of the 21st century university. While this image is contested and demands careful evaluation of the public discourses of higher education alongside the empirical realities of student life (Falconer and Taylor 2016), it nevertheless valorizes a model of gender and sexual inclusivity at odds with the heteronormative assumptions associated with traditional Christianity and upheld by these student interviewees.…”

Mediating ‘Aspirant’ Religious-Sexual Futures: In God's Hands?

“…The majority of respondents did not easily identify in terms of social class as a personal identification, but did use this as a classifying device to describe others, their families, backgrounds, schooling experiences, whilst often still reluctant to attach this to themselves personally Scurry 2011, Falconer andTaylor 2016). Class was ambivalently articulated, and not always explicitly claimed, participants often alluded to it culturally, spatially, and emotionally (not 'fitting in'), if not in economic terms.…”

“…But such 'callings' were also deflected and silenced in the context of hostile and emotive views regarding the public place of LGBT visibility in religious contexts. For example, Estelle (25) had initially planned a certain kind of religious future, going to university to study Theology but her feelings of disconnect meant that she changed course after just two weeks (see Falconer and Taylor 2016). Often religious orientations, possibilities and practicalities were in motion and were seen to be sites of future reconciliation, even when definite 'callings' and actualised pursuits of that future (such as in studying Theology) were interrupted and uncertain:…”

“…They preferred me to be a lawyer or a doctor, a medical doctor', Jacob, 30). These preferred routes, of attending a 'good university' (James, 17) were widely communicated across the sample, with Nicola (21) knowing that the aim was to go to university and 'be independent' (see Falconer and Taylor 2016). Only one interviewee, Kristy (30), spoke of pursuing higher education as unexpected ('In my family you left school and got a job in a shop or factory or something, and you didn't do anything else, you didn't go to University, you didn't do any of those kinds of jobs you needed training for, so nobody really talked about that at home, it was just, you did whatever job you got').…”

“…The conditions of contemporary neo-liberalism arguably demand and shape a future-oriented, enterprising, capital-accruing subject (Skeggs 2004), where capital is accrued in the person, and generative of future value (Adkins 2012). The 'enterprising subject' compelled by competition, inequality and rational selfinterest, is a particular kind of middle-class subject who can generate value by accruing capital (Falconer and Taylor 2016).…”