Religious and Sexual Identities

A Multi-faith Exploration of Young Adults

Andrew Kam-Tuck Yip, Sarah-Jane Page

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317067054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Presenting qualitative and quantitative findings on the lived experiences of around seven hundred young adults from Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh and mixed-faith backgrounds, Religious and Sexual Identities provides an illuminating and nuanced analysis of young adults' perceptions and negotiations of their religious, sexual, youth and gender identities. It demonstrates how these young adults creatively construct meanings and social connections as they navigate demanding but exciting spaces in which their multiple identities intersect. Accessible quantitative analyses are combined with rich interview and video diary narratives in this theoretically-informed exploration of religious and sexual identities in contemporary society. A timely investigation revealing the multiplicity of contemporary identities, this book will appeal not only to sociologists and scholars of religion, but also to those working in the fields of youth studies, sexuality, gender and identity.

Chapter 1
Introducing Religion, Youth and Sexuality

Introduction

Sex saturates society. From TV chat shows to soap operas, billboard advertisements to the weekend newspapers, radio shows to online forums, discussion about sex permeates everyday life. New forms of sexual lifestyles are promoted online and offline, alongside the increasing commercialisation of sexuality (Johansson 2007, Nikunen 2007, Plummer 2003, Smith 2010). Youth are implicated in this discourse and its development. Youthful bodies are held up as perfect emblems of sexuality, referenced in, among others, magazines, advertisements, music videos and films. Therefore, aged bodies are literally bodies out of place in this culture characterised by the fetishisation of youth (e.g. Gill 2007). Young people today are constructed as imbued with sexual possibility – inheritors of the sexual liberalism brought about by the social changes of the 1960s. They are a generation who are supposed to be having good sex – and lots of it (Attwood 2009). But this supposedly exciting possibility is also twinned with risk. Teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections loom large in the public discourses about youth sexuality. Away from the airbrushed advertisements, youth are constructed as being in a state of uncertainty and even crisis, particularly within the globalised context (Averett et al. 2009, Bagnall 2005, Blatterer 2007, France 2007, Hardy and Raffelli 2003, Nayak and Kehily 2008, Smith and Denton 2005, Tolman 2002).

Sociology has had much to say about young people, examining the abovementioned twin discourses of increased fetishisation of youth and their association with risk. This has been a nuanced discussion, emphasising that the experiences of young people are structured by factors such as class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality (e.g. Cieslik and Pollock 2002, Furlong 2009, Green 2010, Henderson et al. 2007, Khattab and Fenton 2009, Leccardi and Ruspini 2009, Thomson 2009). Such a focus stresses that a young person’s lived experiences are dependent on her/his social location. Thus, a white middle class lesbian young woman’s social situation differs from that of a South Asian working class heterosexual young man, and this contributes to differences in how they make sense of, and interact with, the world. Since social divisions intersect in complex ways, and the outcomes are context-specific, sociologists have rightly emphasised the diversity and complexity within young people’s lived experiences (e.g. Blatterer 2007, Devadason 2008, France 2007, Jones 2009, Richardson and Munro 2012, Roberts 2009, Roche et al. 2004, Thomson 2009, White and Wyn 2008, Wierenga 2009).

Youth has been studied from a number of angles, and youth and sexuality in particular has received much attention (e.g. Dodge et al. 2004, Dworkin 2005, Willoughby and Dworkin 2009). However, until recent years, religion as a social factor has not generated much attention in the research literature on youth; and when it has been referenced, research has usually focused on a single religion, mostly Christianity. Addressing the research gap in studying the intersection of religion, youth and sexuality, this book takes religion as its point of departure, mapping the lived experiences of young adults from six religious traditions, as well as those from mixed-faith backgrounds, in relation to sexuality and gender. Sexuality, as we shall argue, is not only about personal emotions, choices, troubles, and decisions; it is also about culture and politics, where the personal and the social intertwine – and at times, collide (e.g. Jackson and Scott 2010a, Plummer 1995, 2003, Richardson and Munro 2012, Weeks 2007, 2010, 2011).

In dominant popular and academic discourses about the relationship between religion and sexuality, religion is often constructed in sex-negative terms. Debate in this regard often centres upon the constraining potential of religion on sexuality, most notably over the issue of same-sex marriage and gay priests. Conservative religious voices have dominated the debate, reinforcing this sex-negative view of religion (e.g. Cobb 2006, Sachs 2009, Viefhues-Bailey 2010). It appears then, that religious young adults are occupying a rather contradictory space. Interpellated as the bearers of sexual freedom, they are situated within seemingly traditionalist and conservative contexts, invoking notions of repression, the policing of sexual desire, and the exclusion of fun.

This book, however, takes a different approach. Rather than starting from wellworn assumptions about religion, we decided to start from the lived experiences and understandings of religious young adults themselves, to illuminate the ways in which they navigate the terrain of sexuality and religion in diverse spaces and contexts, and how they operate within the above-mentioned dominant discourses. In the process, a number of assumptions are challenged. As subsequent chapters will show, the dominant discourse that all religions are sex-negative and sex-repressive does not sit well with the on-going engagement and negotiation undertaken by religious young adults in their everyday lives. Therefore, repression and traditionalism is not the whole story. Although youth is often constructed as occupying a space of unalloyed sexual freedom with an emphasis on the quality and quantity of sexual encounters, access to such freedom is contingent upon individuals’ social locations and personal characteristics. Dominant youth culture contains its own rules and regulations of engagement. Significant factors such as sexuality and gender play a part in influencing religious young adults’ subjectivities, and impact on both how they navigate the youth-at-risk discourse, as well as the youth-as-sexually-liberated-and-free discourse.

In a nutshell, this book is a narrative of the religious, sexual, youth and gender identities of young adults aged between 18 and 25, living in the UK. Filling the gaps in research on sexuality (that tends to lean towards homosexuality), and research on religion and youth (that tends to focus on a single religion, especially Christianity), this book includes stories from young adults of diverse sexual orientations, as well as six religious traditions, and those from mixedfaith backgrounds (e.g. ‘Buddhist-Christian’). The multi-faith dimension of the research was designed to expand current research and to recognise the increasing religious diversity of British society as a demographic development with profound policy, political, socio-cultural and symbolic significance. Therefore, although we do, in some cases, compare our participants’ views and experiences across the above-mentioned religious identifications, the book does not aim to undertake a comprehensive quantitative comparison along this line. That would have led to a very different research design, with different aims (more details in the brief methodological account below). Specifically, the book explores these religious young adults’ identities, the significant factors that inform the construction of such identities, and the strategies they develop to manage the intersection of these identities in living them out in everyday context. Therefore, the book explores the multiple meanings these religious young adults construct and the multilayered connections they foster within diverse spaces and contexts, and how such meanings inform – and are in turn informed by – these social connections.

In the remainder of this chapter, we shall first explore three conceptual themes that frame the book, followed by a brief discussion of the research design and methodology of the study on which this book is based. The chapter then ends with a discussion of the structure of the book.

Living religion in the everyday

Some would argue that putting the words ‘youth’ and ‘religion’ in the same sentence warrants an explanation, as dominant academic and popular discourses continue to neglect their connection and emphasise their incompatibility. On closer inspection, such discourses stress the institutional dimension of religion, focusing on authority structures and their ‘top-down’ teachings and injunctions that demand conformity and deference (see also Chapter 7). On the other hand, youth is characterised by experimentation, exploration and change, representing a stage in the life-course that involves intense identity work in order to develop an ‘inner voice’ and ontological anchor, vis-à-vis a fast-paced, fragmented and pluralistic globalised culture (e.g. Bagnall 2005, France 2007, Roche et al. 2004, Thomson 2009, White and Wyn 2008). From this perspective, young adults’ life experiences and priorities are at odds with the rigidity and ‘structuredness’ that religion seems to impose and demand. Therefore, in these discourses, the relationship between religion and youth is at best tenuous and negligible (e.g. Hunt 2007).

Nonetheless, research has incontrovertibly shown that religion and faith connections do matter for many young adults, significantly informing the construction of their biographical narratives and strategic life-planning (e.g. Collins-Mayo and Dandelion 2010, Herrera and Bayat 2010, Pearce and Denton 2011, Smith and Denton 2005, Smith and Snell 2009). Religion, alongside other factors such as youth culture and family, could constitute a significant ‘field of existence’ or ‘biographical domain’ (Thomson 2009) that is meaning-generating and subjectivity-producing. Thus, exploring how young adults understand and live out their religion can generate important insights into how they construct their personal and social identities by engaging with the broader social processes of individualisation, de-traditionalisation and subjectivisation that many scholars argue are defining characteristics of the contemporary religious landscape and society as a whole (e.g. Adams 2007, Bauman 2006, 2011, Heaphy 2007, Heelas and Woodhead 2005, Tacey 2004, Willaime 2006).

Indeed, two important related concepts that have been developed within the sociology of religion in recent years are ‘lived religion’ (McGuire 2003a, 2008) and ‘everyday religion’ (Ammerman 2007, 2010). In our view, these two terms could illuminate how young adults navigate their identities vis-à-vis religion. These concepts capture the ways in which individuals interweave their religious faith with their everyday life, engaging with enabling and constraining potentials in explicitly religious spaces as well as secular spaces 1. This offers the possibilities for encountering religion in unexpected places, and opens the researchers’ minds to the ways in which religion might not be bound up in institutions and/or sacred texts. Lived and everyday religion instead puts the focus on the ingenious ways individuals craft their faith in a complex world. But this does not mean that lived religion denotes simply an individualistic endeavour, as McGuire argues:

The term ‘lived religion’ is useful for distinguishing the actual experience of religious persons from the prescribed religion of institutionally defined beliefs and practices… Although lived religion pertains to the individual, it is not merely subjective. Rather, people construct their religious worlds together, often sharing vivid experiences of that intersubjective reality… [F]rom many and often diverse cultural resources, the individual constructs a personal identity amalgam that may blend or draw serially on different elements, foregrounding some elements in one social context and deemphasizing others. Thus, an individual’s religious identity may include some sense of connection or continuity with a larger tradition, religious group, family, and other bases of commitment and sense of belonging but is not limited to them. (2008: 12, 209)

In the same vein, Ammerman asserts that:

Religion itself is multi-dimensional, and those dimensions of belief, belonging, practice and experience can be combined in myriad ways across the individual lives we study. Religion is also multi-sited, finding expression across the multiple social institutions that were once thought to be destined for religion-free rational calculation. Those multiple sites shape and are shaped by the religion that happens there. (2010: 164)

In this formulation, focus is placed on what people do as well as what they think or believe, because an individual’s beliefs about the world may not be thoroughly cogent and may draw upon a range of influences. In other words, rather than following official religious teachings, individuals, within the everyday context, make sense of the world in a much more fluid and messy way, and it is unlikely that religious adherents’ beliefs and practices will exactly map onto that which are prescribed by religious authorities (e.g. Hunt and Yip 2012, MacKian 2012, Marranci 2010, Nynäs and Yip 2012, Yip and Nynäs 2012).

At the same time, there are additional factors to take into account when studying sexuality and religion within the lived/everyday context. In contemporary Britain, religion is often dominantly constructed in terms of authoritarianism; associated with rule-following and strict moral codes. From this perspective, religion is associated with the intolerance of sexual diversity and difference, and religious communities are held up as spaces which are not progressive in terms of sexual ethics. For example, it is conservative religious groups who are considered to be against sexual equality (McAndrew 2010); and when religion is discussed in relation to sexuality, it is often in the context of conflict, such as the Anglican Church’s debate on homosexuality, epitomised in the furore, in 2003, of the possible appointment of a gay bishop in the UK, Jeffrey John2 (e.g. Bates, 2005, Linzey and Kirker 2005, Peyton and Gatrell 2013, Yip 2005a). More recently, religious authorities articulated the strongest opposition to the Government’s consultation on same-sex marriage (which aims to legalise same-sex marriage in England and Wales).3 Sexuality has therefore assumed great significance, as it is one of the main terrains upon which religious and secular value systems and truth claims compete (Hunt and Yip 2012). By holding up religion as an intolerant space, dominant discourses position secular spaces as having an exclusive claim to progressive ethics, which itself is a highly debatable and contentious issue (see Asad 2009, Brown 2009).

By using religious young adults’ experiences and voices as the starting point of the book, we aim to demonstrate the complex ways in which they negotiate and interweave diverse cultural scripts, personal religious faith and practice to position themselves and to construct their own relationships with the world. But even here, the sand continually shifts. Making sense of the world is no easy task, as we shall show in the subsequent chapters. ‘Everyday/lived religion’ prioritises this messiness, complexity and fluidity.

Embodiment, heteronormativity and sexualisation of culture

Like religion, sexuality and gender are lived phenomena (Nayak and Kehily 2008), constituted through various cultural norms. Popular understandings often construct sexuality and gender as fixed phenomena, but we take the view that they are not embedded in some sort of natural order, but are established through social norms and processes (e.g. Rahman and Jackson 2010, Richardson 2007, Yip and Nynäs 2012). As Foucault (1990) has persuasively argued, different sexualities are discursively constituted in different times and spaces. It was at a particular point in history that ‘the homosexual’ came into being, for example. Similarly, dividing the human race in terms of women and men is a construct that essentialises these gender categories, and denies a broader range of other categories, such as trans and intersex (Cornwall 2009, Hines 2007, Hines and Sanger 2010, Hines and Taylor 2012, Kane-DeMaios and Bullough 2006, D. Valentine 2007). In addition, what it means to be a woman, man, gay, heterosexual, bisexual and so on is culturally, spatially and temporally contingent.

How the sexed and gendered body is produced through various discourses has been a key concern of social scientists in recent years. Therefore, embodiment has become a salient lens through which sexual experiences and perceptions can be understood, with a plethora of studies emphasising how the body is interpellated in relation to dominant sexual and gender ideals (Holland et al. 2004, McRobbie 2009, Tolman 2002, Turner 1984, Young 2005). Cregan defines embodiment as ‘the physical and mental experience of existence’ (2006: 3); in other words, how one experiences life through the body. In addition, theorists have paid attention to how the body is socially constituted. For example, Jackson and Scott (2010a) discuss embodiment in terms of not only the physical body and its capacity to desire other bodies (as well as being a desirable body in itself); they locate the body as interacting with its surroundings, for ‘a body can never be just a body abstracted from mind, self and social context’ (2010a: 146; Original emphasis). Indeed, they argue that meaning itself is generated not through the body but through ‘social contexts, which profoundly affect how we experience our own and others’ bodies’ (2010a: 149). Meanwhile, Foucault has theorised the body as a product of social knowledge, subject to various discourses, such as medical and biological discourses (see e.g. Bailey 1993). Bodies therefore are situated in a complex interplay between agency and structure, with individuals managing their bodies in relation to various knowledges circulating about them.

Sexuality is pivotal to this discussion, as it comes to be a defining evocation of the body in contemporary society. Indeed, as Butler (1993) rightly argues, bodies matter. In the realm of sexuality, bodies frame our sexual encounters, and those encounters have profound social and political meanings. Therefore, the body does not exist as an independent ‘object’, but comes into existence through our cultural understandings and the meanings we attach to our experiences, and these are shaped by common-sense understandings relating to sexuality and gender.

One dominant discourse that regulates bodies and bodily relations is that of heteronormativity. We conceive heteronormativity as a cultural ideology and a set of institutional practices that systematically – often implicitly – legitimise and establish heterosexuality as the norm for not only sexual, but social relations. It represents a powerful moralistic stratification of social actors and groups. Heterosexuality, thus, becomes the ‘organising principle of social life’ (Hockey et al. 2007) and the ‘assumption’ that structures social relations (Weeks et al. 2001). Chambers asserts that heteronomativity is ‘the assemblage of regulatory practices, which produces intelligible genders within a heterosexual matrix that insists upon the coherence of sex/gender/desire’ (2007: 667). Heteronormativity could also be understood as an ‘inheritance’ (Ahmed 2006a) which draws ‘moral boundaries’ (Ahmed 2006b) that, through the process of primary and secondary socialisation, one learns to repeatedly perform and therefore concretise such boundaries. Heteronormativity, as a system and structure, is often invisible and silent, but it is pervasive and entrenched, and its power manifests itself most evidently in precisely this invisibility and silence (Dennis 2003, Jackson 2006). It is, as Hockey et al. (2007) remind us repeatedly – ‘nowhere and everywhere’. It hegemonises heterosexuality, and by default renders variant sexualities wrong, even immoral; or at best, inferior. Thus, heterosexuality – as opposed to homosexuality which was the love that dared not speak its name – ‘was a love that did not need to dare to speak its name. It just was’ (Weeks 2011: 79). In essence, we argue that heteronormativity is more than a sexual structure. It is also a moral and social structure, within which non-heterosexually-identified individuals have to navigate to find a sense of direction in a ‘strange’ land.

In the same vein, Rich’s (1980) concept of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ captures the way in which both sexuality and gender intersect in the reproduction of a heterosexist ‘ideal’. Fostering a perception that heterosexuality is natural and normal, this endorses a view that women and men are compelled to come together, and this privileging of heterosexuality also supports and legitimises the division of gender through, for instance, the ideology of gender complementarity and difference in relationship formation (i.e. ‘opposites attract’). This ideology excludes lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people from the p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Appendices
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing Religion, Youth and Sexuality
• 2 Faith Matters: Exploring Meanings and Connections of Religion
• 3 Understanding Sexuality: Negotiating Relationship Values
• 4 Embodying Sexuality: Managing Bodily Practices
• 5 Stirring Passions: Managing Singleness, Relationships and Counter-normative Sexualities
• 6 Positioning Oneself in the World: Negotiating Sexualised Cultures in Diverse Spaces and Contexts
• 7 Conclusions: Understanding Young Adults’ Religious Faith and Sexuality
• Appendix A.1 Online Questionnaire
• Appendix A.2 Interview Guide
• Appendix A.3 Video Diary Guidelines
• Appendix A.4 Biographical Details of Interviewed Participants
• Bibliography
• Index