Teaching and Learning > DOCUMENTS
Responding to sexual stereotypes of fundamentalist and charismatic leaders in Religious Studies
Julia Collar
Report
A version of this paper was presented at the British Association for the Study of Religion Conference, held at Southlands College, Roehampton, September 9th 2002 as part of a PRS-LTSN panel
Introduction
While it may be known that the PRS Subject Centre has included Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) students in the scope of Widening Access needs and issues that the centre is concerned with, what may not be known is that the PRS Subject Centre is the only subject centre within the network to do so. Drawing attention to this fact is not intended to infer that the model of Widening Access being conceived by the PRS Subject Centre is in any way better than that of other Subject Centres, or that they in turn are lacking an important aspect of the Widening Access spectrum, but is instead used to key in to the ways that PRS and Widening Access are working together.
At present LGBT Access is being considered primarily within Theology, Religious Studies and Islamic Studies but it is hoped that this will be extended in time to cover all the bases within the PRS Subject Centre's subject remit.
The immediate problem with Widening Access to LGBT students is gaining the recognition that such a move is necessary and legitimate; partly this has been reliant upon a revised understanding of Widening Access that moves its preoccupation away from need first and settles it instead upon identity as the starting point from which needs are met. For the purposes of this discussion questions of legitimacy are entirely avoided, it is assumed that LGBT Access is a required element based on the facts that:
There are LGBT students studying Religious Studies in universities;
The presence of these students ought to be acknowledged and catered for.
The bullet points given above are intended to cause some kind of reaction, and possibly some concern, hinging perhaps on the words 'catered for'. Does this mean teaching students about sex? Does this mean seeking out LGBT content in subjects and integrating this into curricula? While some teachers already integrate such material and perspectives into their courses it is clear that not everyone feels that this is appropriate, neither does everyone necessarily feel comfortable in handling it.
The question must be asked though: are teachers in Religious Studies more or less likely to deal with aspects of sexual orientation by virtue of the subject in hand? LGBT Access in Religious Studies begins somewhat at a disadvantage considering how many faiths, both ancient and contemporary, are theologically convinced that homosexuality is a moral and spiritual sin; this introduces ethical and value-laden perspectives that are difficult to challenge in view of the objective and neutral stance that Religious Studies advocates in the face of ultimately un-quantifiable theologically driven behaviours, beliefs and attitudes.
It is not within the remit of this particular paper to suggest or explore explicit LGBT content in curricula, rather the theme is instead implicit LGBT content, not in terms of pedagogical subtlety but, instead, to draw attention to the ways that LGBT issues can inadvertently arise within TRS with potentially difficult implications and consequences for teachers and learners alike.
Sexual Terrorism: The Queering of Osama Bin Laden
I use the term sexual terrorism not in the sense that Carole Sheffield uses when she writes about sexual violence towards women and children1 but in the sense that there has been a systematic usage of negative LGBT stereotypes as part of the construction of social boundaries that seek to exclude individuals or groups on grounds of their supposed 'otherness'; this is not just 'other' as in 'different from' but a darker and more shadowy 'other' perceived as being suspicious, dangerous, and even evil.
Applying the label of 'gay' to an individual in these circumstances is not necessarily a reflection of their actual sexuality or sexual conduct, but upon the perceived state of their character; it is a label used to discredit and to confirm that the exclusion is deserved. It may be argued that 'propaganda' is a more suitable term for the creation and dissemination of this label, being concerned with the spreading of distorted or negative information about individuals or groups of people; however, these stereotypes frequently work far more aggressively.
Labelling of this kind is becoming an increasingly observable phenomenon in the tabloid media and occurs in a lighter guise in such circumstances as where a celebrity refuses to co-operate and provide open and visible information on their private lives for example; a reluctance or an active effort to maintain privacy, which is equated with the realm of sex and relationships, begs the question whether there is something being deliberately obscured, such as sexual orientation.2
With this in mind, I anticipated certain kinds of reactions towards Osama Bin Laden from the moment he was identified as the likely instigator and financier of the September 11th attacks and it was less than a month afterwards that the hunch was proved right. What follows is some extracts from broadsheet newspapers that appeared on both sides of the Atlantic between the 13th and the 16th of October 2001.3
The first was authored by John le Carre who writes:
"The stylized television footage and photographs of this bin Laden suggest a man of homoerotic narcissism, and maybe we can draw a grain of hope from that. Posing with a Kalashnikov, attending a wedding or consulting a sacred text, he radiates with every self-adoring gesture an actor's awareness of the lens. He has height, beauty, grace, intelligence and magnetism, all great attributes, unless you're the world's hottest fugitive and on the run, in which case they're liabilities hard to disguise."4
Then, the next day Henry Porter of the Observer adds:
"Watching the al-Jazeera broadcast, we were all surely alert to the subliminal messages in the deceptive modesty of his glances, and to his neurotic effeminacy and self-love. It brought to mind the sexual ambivalence of T.E Lawrence who suggested ... that truly dangerous men allow themselves to dream during daylight and then 'act their dreams with their eyes open'."5
And, in response to these articles, Matt Seaton from the Guardian summed them up by writing:
"To emasculate your foe, to label him morally delinquent and sexually deviant, is a well-worn propaganda ploy. So bin Laden, too, must be bent. But is all this amateur psychologising just a superior form of name-calling, or something more?...In this psychodrama, Bin Laden is a cipher, a receptacle for our own fears and desires. In that sense, the 'queer' Bin Laden seen on TV should tell us more about our own psyche that it can about the leader of al-Qaida."6
The trend for this kind of defamation has well established roots; the Ancient Greeks feminised their Persian foes for example and journalists have been quick to draw parallels between the ancient world and the peoples of modern day Afghanistan in other ways too as confirmed by an article relating that the new freedom in the country has lead to the public and cultural re-emergence of man/boy love relationships.7 It is strange to see a celebration of homosexuality in the press, a sexual emancipation, relatively shortly after bin Laden was affirmed as evil by the spectre of homosexuality but, in a throwback to the Taliban, with whom bin Laden has been so much associated, another nuance can be seen.
Homosexuality, as far as is known, is a minority sexuality; labelling your foe as gay therefore firmly establishes them as outside of the dominant straight culture and to make bin Laden a homosexual Muslim doubly so; the implication being that even the Taliban should outcast him or mete out their own prescribed punishment upon him that the fullest extent of their Islamic religious law will allow and, as the British gay press has reported for a number of years, in Afghanistan men accused of homosexual acts were crushed to death by having stone walls toppled over their trussed bodies.
It really doesn't matter whether bin Laden is gay or straight, what matters is discerning whose interests are served if he is labelled as gay because this is gay with a certain amount of baggage - this isn't the kind of gay you wish you could take home to your Mum. This is the kind of gay that is entangled in stereotyped images of the predatory and abusive, psychologically disturbed kind - the kind that Baroness Young in our own House of Lords continually cited as the very reason not to repeal Section 28.8 This is the kind of gay that hangs round the school gates with the drug pushers and paedophiles waiting, along with the bogeyman, to steal the souls of innocent children.
Supposed sexual deviance has become the benchmark of evil in society, the taxonomical classification scheme of a new demonology. It was interesting to see that in Channel 4's recent series on the Masters of Darkness9 for example that they were all highly sexual and sexualised candidates, however they possessed a degree of 'greatness' and though dubbed wicked, their contribution and effect upon culture and society in their own lifetimes through to the present was acknowledged. This greatness interestingly meant that they avoided being 'queered' and named as homosexuals even though some of them did, on occasion, prefer to exert their wickedness upon men as well as women.
Other important characters have not been so fortunate - in a new biography of Hitler10 for example which was released around the same time as the newspaper articles cited, much of his destructive ambition is attributed to his inability to come to terms with his latent homosexuality. Destructive is the key word here, it is this component that seems to attract the accusing finger of homosexuality most frequently, Destructive actions are exactly that, they aim to take away, eliminate, decimate in the eyes of the victims - the traditional and theologically based disapproval of homosexuality is that it does not have procreation as its end so a soul bent on destructive actions must necessarily carry this demeanour through into their most basic and primal urges too. This association can result in sexual behaviour being seen as a necessary or intrinsic attribute for a truly evil personality.
A similar dynamic of sexual terrorism is visible within the study of New Religious Movements where unsubstantiated allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of charismatic leaders often occur. A great deal of suspicion surrounds these unusual figures anyway but it seems that the media are less inclined somehow to call into question the theological principles that a charismatic leader adheres to - here they err on the side of safety and defer to a kind of mocking agnosticism instead - but the sexual behaviour of these leaders, if it is perhaps a little out of the ordinary, is something that is felt to occasion open and unhindered critique.
Widening Access
These complex LGBT issues surely deserve discussion in a number of different subject areas, but as you will note from the title of this presentation I defer to a response tactic from with Religious Studies, which I wish to suggest should be an adjunct to Widening Access within the discipline.
Some possible responses of this kind were discussed by Dr Deryn Guest at a colloquium we held in July on Widening Access to Sacred Text. It is a particularly useful paper that is shortly due for publication. She spoke about teaching Judges 3 - the rape of King Eglon by Ehud - another example of a feminised and emasculated enemy - and the kinds of assumptions the story itself begs in our understanding of it, the kinds of assumptions students themselves bring into learning encounters with the text, and the ways in which these can be challenged. I don't think that she went nearly far enough however as her teaching solutions were engaged to deal specifically with this portion of the Old Testament and I am not sure whether she necessarily considered their transferability beyond it.
But what this portion of Judges 3 has in common with the queering of bin Laden, or with the sexually dubious reputations of charismatic leaders is the fact that these areas of tension are frequently reliant on visual or descriptive images of these figures, as Le Carre and Porter demonstrate by fixing on bin Laden's television image for example, and not on quantifiable fact leading to the creation of false and presumptive identities that are intended simply to alienate.
As I mentioned earlier, perspectives on Widening Access in Religious Studies can usefully and effectively shift from a need basis to that of identity - for example, dealing with particular impairments through Widening Access is not just about the impairment, it is about people who experience that impairment and who identify themselves in certain ways in relation to it. And this is where Religious Studies has a distinct advantage over many others subject area as Religious Studies is very good at taking an open and objective stance towards that which can be observed, e.g. visible identities, through the employment of phenomenology. Phenomenology is admittedly problematic and somewhat outdated as Gavin Flood argues11, but it has a use where students are being inducted into a particular kind of learning environment, a Widening Access environment within Religious Studies.
Introductions to phenomenology generally occur very early on in undergraduate Religious Studies degrees either in its own right or as part of a history of the discipline. But what if it was used as an ethical basis for Widening Access in Religious Studies and introduced not as a theory but as an active social foundation skill to enable an accepting learning environment?
This conception of Widening Access is not based on how successfully needs can be met and how much money has been put into providing equipment and training; my understanding is predicated instead on how well disparate and transitory student identities are accepted and supported in learning environments from the LGBT student who is out perhaps for the first time, to the dyslexic student who needs a note-taker, to the student with cerebral palsy, to the student who wears gothic style clothes and has a bolt through their lip, to the student who yawns and disparages at every available opportunity: all potentially highly visible characters who will attract some kind of judgement over their inclusion or exclusion in the social processes supporting learning .
With this in mind it becomes important to be sensitive to the kinds of subtle factors that can impact upon the successful social interactions between students; this is not an appeal to a lovely, if utopian, atmosphere where everyone likes one another but is instead an appeal to an atmosphere where everyone at least accepts one another by maintaining an open attitude towards the visible identities that are encountered. This kind of objectivity does not leave individuals open to defending or justifying their identities, which is something that LGBT students are especially vulnerable to.
But is not as easy as that: the case study I have used here - the issue of a queer bin Laden and the wider equation of homosexuality with evil - is an example of territory that, if mishandled, can hinder or even break down acceptance between students as what is being advocated by a queer bin Laden is rejection, ridicule, and even a potential incitement of violence towards homosexuality.
It must be borne in mind that sexual orientation is a hidden and private identity unless an individual chooses to make it public. So while it may be readily apparent through a variety of means which students are physically or sensory impaired for example, someone's sexuality is not so obvious. Mostly we just assume that everyone is straight unless they say otherwise; as Tracy Skelton points out "one does not have to come out as a woman, as white, or as able-bodied."12
Conclusion
Religious Studies is fraught with encounters with moral absolutes and binaries of right and wrong, good and bad, many of which are to do with human relationships and the use and misuse of sex and sexuality as Marcella Althaus-Reid argues13. Religions are by and large uncomfortable with, and in many cases completely reject, homosexuality but this does not at the same time mean that Religious Studies must necessarily deal with homosexuality in the same way by allowing sexual assumptions about the religious and political figures encountered through the course of a degree scheme, if and when they are brought into a learning situation, to exist without being challenged and responded to.
Osama bin Laden brings with him a great deal of emotional and moral baggage but that is no excuse to allow suspect attitudes towards sexuality to slip in un-noticed. These attitudes are bound to arise if not explicitly and then implicitly; there are many students after all who will have been to an upper school where the word gay was used to denote those who were unpopular, or those who were perceived as weak, or stupid, or even those who liked to work and succeed in their studies; and these attitudes don't necessarily disappear in Sixth Form or in the summer break between A levels and taking up a university place.
An identity based Widening Access shifts the onus of the success of the project away from the teacher and lays some responsibility with all agents in the learning environment however, teachers carry with them authority and status by virtue of their job role so the teacher must always retain responsibility for the management of Widening Access. As Amy Blumenthal puts it;
"my role is to guide learning and to model learning, to be a learned learner. To me, this means not only should I be a support for ... students, but I should challenge all students to examine their attitudes and behaviours, especially when these are oppressive to a large group of people"14
And I would say that though teaching about sex and providing sexual content to courses is not necessary responding to these sexual stereotypes on a need basis is an intrinsic part of the management of a truly sensitive and equality conscious Widening Access. The nature and problem of human evil and theologically justified actions is something that Religious Studies tangles with constantly but this doesn't need dressing up in sexual stereotypes in order for the 'evil' to continue to be so: the motif is clear enough without it.
Additional resources:
http://www.subgenius.com/updates/9-11-01/X0013_Osama_Bin_Laden_The_.html
Am epic poem written the day after 9/11 relating the 'comical' saga of Osama Bin Laden the Queer and George W. Bush the Retard. Interesting to see how the two labels 'Queer' and 'Retard' are balanced against one another.
http://www.godhatesamerica.com/ghfmir/main/faq.html
The content of this page is interesting if a little strong but what is chiefly important are the pictures of missiles bound for bombing raids on Afghanistan that have been engraved with an anti-gay message.
http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/september_2002/sex.html
Another more recent poetic offering.
www.godhatesfags.com and www.godhatesamerica.com
The WebPages of Fred Phelps and the Westboro' Baptist Church - outspoken anti-gay campaigners and political lobbyists.
http://www.angelfire.com/fl3/uraniamanuscripts/sept11.html
Memorial sites to the LGBT victims and heroes of 9/11
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,554220,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,554281,00.html
Two stories relating to Jerry Falwell's statement that LGBT hold some of the responsibility for the events of 9/11. He later retracted this with a message posted on his website: www.falwell.com
Notes
1Carole J. Sheffield, Talking to America about Sexual Terrorism, 1995 - http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/Porn/Sheffield.html [Go Back]
2For examples of this see: Alicia Keys - http://www.rainbownetwork.com/content/News.asp?newsid=2679 [Go Back]
Melanie Chisholm (Sporty Spice) - http://www.rainbownetwork.com/content/News.asp?newsid=1825
Or Google search for: Robbie Williams, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck
3There is no discussion or commentary on these articles in this paper; the contents are open enough without it. These articles could be used to stimulate discussion in a seminar situation. [Go Back]
4John Le Carre, We have already lost, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada, October 13th 2001 [Go Back]
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2001/10/13_le-carre_already-lost.htm, Accessed 03/09/2002
5Henry Porter, Why we are right to fight, The Observer, October 14th 2001 [Go Back]
http://www.observer.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,573664,00.html, Accessed 03/09/2002
6Matt Seaton, Go ahead and demonise Osama bin Laden if you like - but the amateur psychology has got to stop, The Guardian, October 16th 2001 [Go Back]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,574738,00.html, Accessed 03/09/2002
7Tim Reid, Kandahar comes out of the closet, in The Times, January 12th 2002 [Go Back]
8See: http://www.rainbownetwork.com/content/News.asp?newsid=1733, http://www.datalounge.com/datalounge/news/record.html?record=6297 [Go Back]
9See the homepage at: http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/M/masters_darkness/ [Go Back]
10Lothar Machtan, The Hidden Hitler, The Perseus Press, 2001 [Go Back]
11Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology, Cassell, 1999 [Go Back]
12Tracy Skelton, Issues of Sexuality in the Teaching Space in Journal of Geography in Higher Education, Volume 21, 1997, p427 [Go Back]
13Marcella Althaus Reid, Indecent Theology, Routledge, London,New York and Canada, 2000 [Go Back]
14AmyBlumenthal (and Mary L. Mittler), On Being a Change Agent: Teacher as Text, Homophobia as Context, in Linda Garber(Editor), Tilting the Tower, Routledge, London and New York, 1994, p6 [Go Back]
This page was originally on the website of The Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies. It was transfered here following the closure of the Subject Centre at the end of 2011.
