Panchami Jose
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR, Mumbai, India
The poster was presented on 27th May 2020
The study tries to explore various cultural beliefs about childhood sexuality held by teachers and how the cross-cutting modalities of religion, caste, sexuality, and gender of the teacher and students shape these constructs. Through teacher interviews, the study aims to understand which sexual identities are preferred by the teachers and how the school discourse regulates the unfavoured sexual identities of the students. I have tried to look at the social context in which teachers and students are placed and understand how the social context has shaped the school discourse. Preliminary analysis of the interviews shows that many of the teachers’ narratives are shaped by the macro-discourses in society. Teachers have imbibed many prejudices from the widespread anti-Muslim narratives. These beliefs and assumptions about Muslim community shape and organize other beliefs and practices within the school.
2 replies on “Exploring teachers’ understanding of students’ sexuality and sexual knowledge”
I find the interaction of these different cross cutting modalities with each other and the macro social narratives, a very interesting topic to explore but at the same time very complex.
1. I would be interested in knowing more about these macro social narratives (MSN): their emergence and variation across time and space and also across different standpoints. For the space aspect for example, the macro social narrative about Muslims in my social sphere is that they are conservative and generally hypo-sexualised as a religious community. The role of MSN in influencing identity attribution/perception at the individual level probably also goes through other filters like individual experience.
2. I understand you acknowledge the influence of your standpoint but in naming the themes are you over attributing certain things (you probably have some other information that I don’t or you haven’t provided the other parts of the transcript). For eg. for me “love jihad” as a theme does not emerge from the excerpt that you have provided.
Also isn’t it expected that practitioners of a particular religion would emphasize their religious morality; It would be interesting to know what institutions managed by other religions would have to say for the same questions.
Thanks Joseph.
I won’t be able to comment much on how the narratives have changed over the years. There is always anxiety about Muslim population growth.Economic status of Muslims in Kerala, especially in the northern districts is sound, mostly due to their migration to gulf countries. Many of the economic activities are dominated by the Muslim community in the last few decades. So there is always insecurity within the non-Muslims due to their inability to exercise self-control in business. The picture of muslims as the demographic and economic threat has certainly led to their otherisation. The syro Malabar church many times have come up with official communique (which is read during the Sunday mass across the churches in Kerala)expressing their fear about the demographic change. Few of the teachers also talked about the increase in muslim population, both outside as well as within the school.
Also in many popular discourses, Especially the movies, the Muslim community can be seen as represented as people with unregulated sexual instincts. The religion is also visualised as regressive and stagnant.They are mocked for their illiteracy,large families, polygamy, child marriage and so on.
Muslim men are seen as libidinous, also as child predators.
Yeah, as you said individual experiences also shapes the images which we have. I was trying to look at their narratives and see whether it was influenced by some of the dominant discourses present outside. It requires greater engagement to understand how their personal experiences have influenced and shaped these narratives. This is certainly a limitation of the study.
There were few narratives which I felt were influenced by the larger Love-jihad debates, which I could not make it to the poster.One of them was :
“These “kakka chekanmar”(kakka is a word used to refer muslim community, sometimes non-muslims use it in a derogatory sense, chekkanmar refers to boys) will be there in the town from the morning, they will be seen near the bus stands, ground and infront of many shops. These are older boys, who are mostly dropouts of some schools. They will be waiting on their bikes for the buses in which the girls arrive and follow them till school. During this age girls also fall for them, not all but few. They start chatting and within days that will turn into a romantic relationship. These boys have many friends and relatives inside the school, and through them, they try to contact the girls. In Muslim community, they have larger network. They meet often and since they have larger families, they are relatives to each other. So they help each other to make such relations. Girls will be reluctant initially, but these friends (girls) will persuade and convince them. Earlier there were many incidents of such relations. Now we have school buses. Now they don’t get many chances to meet outside.”
None of the teachers believed it as a conspiracy, but they felt that Muslim boys generally flirt and annoy other girls.