Genders, sexualities and Religious Education

Genders, sexualities and Religious EducationToday, issues of genders and sexualities are contested, in the Global South as well as the Global North.Being inextricably interwoven with cultural practices, social attitudes, political ideologies and religious convictions, in education issues of genders and sexualities, needs clarification, critical examination and considered debates.Evidently, matters of genders and sexualities have strong repercussions on the perceived possibilities available for human beings' identity formation, as well as other life opportunities.The issues at stake for work, education, community and love require our serious consideration as Religious Education researchers and educators.In many socio-cultural settings in which Religious Education is offered as a school subject, human sexuality and identifications of gender have become matters of human rights too with wider implications for schooling and society.Gender, sexuality, identity, and faith are words with varied and often highly disputed meanings connected to them.This is especially more so today, when digital technologies increasingly float meanings across cultures.In the call for papers for this Special Issue, entitled Genders, Sexualities and Religious Education: Theory, Policy and Practice, we deliberately chose to put the concepts 'genders' and 'sexualities' in the plural.Our intention in doing this was to give researchers freedom to address the issues in multifaceted ways.We wanted to allow for a richness of perspectives for researchers to demonstrate variations in terms of local conditions, culturally, politically, and religiously, for what can and is being done in Religious Education on these contested issues.The seven articles presented in this Special Issue do provide variations regarding theoretical perspectives, policy directions, practices, and geographical socio-cultural contexts, as well as raising several matters of principle.Some articles exemplify how governmental authorities and religious communities, respectively, can set the conditions for how genders and sexualities can, or ought to be lived.Others offer examples of direct teaching in Religious Education through steering documents or theological argumentation.There is, however, not only an explicit curriculum underlying how matters of genders and sexualities are taught but also often an implicit or even a null curriculum.Research can assist us in clarifying, questioning, and critiquing the various forms of curriculum, and in doing so also contribute towards positive transformation.Issues and debates raised in this Special Issue are geographically representative of various regions and socio-cultural contexts, particularly Africa, Europe North America and Eastern Asia.The articles are from Ghana, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Canada, the USA and South Korea.We will introduce each one in more detail below.A much-debated issue in many of these articles is the positioning in relation to how religion and education engage with struggles for the rights of LGBTQIA+ persons (i.e.Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual + other possible/future genders and sexualities).In this regard, the contexts of such articles can be said to represent a continuum that ranges from political, social and cultural acceptance of various understandings of genders and sexualities as in Sweden and Norway, and to Ghana, where since 2021 heterosexuality has been mandated by law as being the only acceptable form of sexuality, and other forms of sexuality are declared unlawful.As a middle position on the continuum, the two texts from Germany and Austria are examples of places in which matters of LGBTQIA+ are under debate, and a former hetero-normative understanding is being questioned.Turning to matters of masculinity and femininity in relation to sexuality and gender, the text from Ghana exemplifies a local political situation where what is often referred to as a traditional understanding of masculinity and femininity, is the expected behaviour of men and women, respectively.