Being lesbian is no sin : religion, sexuality and education in the lives of female students

Abstract

The embodiment of religion in Maltese culture permeates its social organisations. Specifically, the institutionalisation of Catholic beliefs in Maltese society forms value systems and policy in education. This paper discusses the ways that Catholic morality discourses are intertwined with discourses revolving around gender identity, sexual pleasure and the erotic as they emerge from a number of hidden graffiti written on the toilet doors of a postsecondary school in Malta. These graffiti are considered subversive processes of learning, which reproduce, reinforce, question, resist and reject dominant Catholic morality discourses surrounding teenage sexual conduct and gender identity. These students’ voices, acting within a graffiti community, offer means of negotiating and resolving tensions, which arise in described romantic and sexual encounters. The discursive spaces created by the graffiti writers question what constitutes ‘normal’ and demonstrate the contradictory ways that sexual issues could be perceived, understood and experienced. They demonstrate that sexual and erotic knowledge is acquired informally through the hidden curriculum by means of anonymous graffiti, which demonstrate a plethora of mixed feelings surrounding sexual ethics. These writings manifest students’ experimentations with public/private boundaries and their attempts at breaking silences, secrecies and taboos revolving around sexualities. The study discusses how adolescent sexual identities are constructed within political, moral, religious and cultural agendas. It addresses the invisibility, voicelessness and non-representation of sexuality education issues in postsecondary curricula.