When Sexuality Clashes with Conservative Faith
Assistant professor Kurt Blankschaen explores what happens when our multifaceted identities seem to be in opposition to one another.
Here at Yes, Misstrix, I often have the pleasure of speaking with amazing people doing fascinating work in the realm of sex, sensuality, sexuality and desire. This is the final part of my three-part interview with Kurt Blankschaen, an assistant professor at Daemen University who teaches (among other things) a course called Sex, Love and God. Read part one here. Read part two here.
Yes, Misstrix: Last time, we ended with a discussion about your students being really focused on trans issues and the complexities that can come up as a result of not having the vocabulary to talk about those issues. That's actually a great transition to your forthcoming article about the idea of transgender identity and language, as this is the kind of thing people are grappling with now. So, can you speak a little bit about that work? What are you noticing? What did you hope to achieve when you set out to look into this issue?
Kurt Blankschaen: About five years ago, I published this paper on sexual orientation and Natural Law, this very traditional Catholic theological analysis of sex. In that paper, I was looking at the questions, ‘How could you be in a same-sex relationship that was romantic and sexual, and still respect even the most conservative structures of Natural Law?’ and ‘How would that still be permitted?’ I got a lot of really positive responses, even from folks who disagreed with the fundamental premise.
Back then, one of my friends, who taught my paper to students in his school, asked me, ‘But what do I say to my students who are trans and Catholic?’ I didn't have a great answer at the time, but I started thinking about it more and more. That’s how I came up with this paper. I started reading more about it and most of the literature that was written on the topic was by fairly conservative Catholics. The idea was that you’re in this body as a sexual individual and you can’t really change that because it’s chromosomally determined. It can’t be reassigned or changed. You’re just kind of here. And, maybe unsurprisingly, a lot of people who are trans didn't find that position very helpful or very informative.
One of the things I wanted to try and do was to explore what would be a productive way for people who were trans and Catholic or even people who were trans and worked in Catholic spaces to try and find common ground. So, the idea was, well sure, we're all born with a body with certain biology, but the way our society empowers us or benefits from that biology really matters. So, I think that the analogy with language is helpful because we tend to think of language as being between English and French or English and Spanish, and even with those languages as examples, if there are a couple of states that outlaw a language, it really does matter. It’s going to impact how you're understood and how your life is going to flourish.
One of the things I try to draw attention to is when we contrast verbal language or auditory language with sign language. All of a sudden, this contrast becomes super sharp because there is this idea like, ‘How could you possibly flourish, if you can't hear things? Oh my God, that must be the worst.’ But when you get to know people who are deaf, they report, ‘My life actually goes pretty well.’ And if the reason that a lot of people who are deaf, don't flourish or don't live their best lives is because we sort of set up society to exclude them, then that looks much more like a problem with the way we set up society rather than there being any inherent deficiency with being deaf.
I say, ‘Well, look, the exact same thing happens with being trans. It depends on how our society has been set up or organized to empower or exclude individuals based on the gender they're trying to demonstrate.’ Instead, if we start making these changes to include or affirm transgender identity and all of a sudden, people's lives start going better when we stop persecuting them, I think that speaks much more to a political cause rather than any kind of personal inability to succeed. That's the 46 paper in a nutshell.
YM: What’s your next area of focus? What topic is on your mind right now?
KB: One of the things I'm looking at is a paper on marriage. I think there is this really popular narrative that when we legalized marriage equality, that was it. Cause complete. Mission accomplished. You go home and move on to the next thing, but you're done with this issue. I guess one thing that bothered me about that is I don't think causes are ever really done.
I think the main reason that most people got involved in being allies to that cause was because they recognized how not having these legal rights made a huge difference in people's lives. You couldn't make healthcare decisions involving children, you couldn't be involved in end-of-life care. Even when same-sex couples had filled out the appropriate paperwork, sometimes those documents were ignored or not enforced. People recognized that as this kind of inhibition or interference with what we might call social marriage—the people falling in love together, helping out around the house, being in these romantically and sexually committed partnerships.
So, I want to say, if the reason you got involved in the fight to legalize marriage was to make those relationships recognized and lawful, the same kind of interference is still happening within these conservative faith traditions. For example, you can't, say, baptize your kids with the whole congregation or your relationship won't be recognized in certain religious circles.
I want to try and bring attention to that, to say this same kind of interference is happening. Sure, it's not legal, but it's no different in that it’s institutionally structured. And if you talk to people who are in these gay or lesbian relationships and involved in these conservative faith traditions, the inability to fully participate wounds them just as deeply. We've done a lot for legal and social marriage, and we shouldn't downplay or disregard that, but there's still a lot more to do for this group that maybe we haven't really thought about too much.
YM: That’s probably especially true for people who aren't a part of those faiths, right? It feels like the legal implications were the big thing. But for people who exist in this arena of faith and want to participate fully in their religion, this is a huge deal. It is probably just as important as some of those legal implications. Is that what you’re finding?
KB: Yeah, because if you start to read personal memoirs or blogs or autobiographies of people who are gay and Mormon or lesbian and Muslim, it's a both-and kind of account. If you were to say, ‘Well, just stop being Mormon,’ that’s not an effective or helpful response. It's about as helpful as telling someone to stop being bisexual. Because if you don't see the world in that way and you don't relate to the world in that way, you might not realize that it's not something that you can compartmentalize. Your faith is part of who you are, and it is interwoven throughout everything.
YM: Do you touch on sex or identity issues in some of the other courses that you teach?
KB: I try to fold these topics into some of the medical courses. I teach a class called Medicine, Culture, and the Self: Introduction to Medical Humanities, and I touch on a couple of different things with sex in there. One is looking at how racism and sex sort of go together, especially with respect to policies on sterilization, where the government looks at who is seen as like a ‘fit or responsible person’ to procreate. Alternatively, then, who hasn’t been responsible. If you have six children with six fathers and you’re on welfare, we're going to make a condition of sterilization. You see that up until like the ’70s in certain states.
So, focusing on that point is one thing we do, and then the other is we do a whole unit on illness and identity. When does an illness become who you are? Instead of just having a cold or having the flu, it's now an ‘I am.’ We look at three snapshots, the first being leprosy, now more commonly called Hansen's Disease. The second being HIV/AIDS, and the third being cancer.
But I really kind of focus on the HIV/AIDS because it draws attention to the idea of sexual relationships, but it also looks at when community members are responsible for each other. I think one of the astonishing things that we see in HIV/AIDS in the ’80s is this large-scale activism to demand that the government change. Not just changing what kinds of medications are available but how we do research, who is covered under insurance and who provides care.
One of the really interesting things is that even though men historically aren't seen as the domestic caregiver or the nurturer, that's exactly what we did see in the ’80s. We saw committed men taking care of each other and caring for who were both dying from AIDS and AIDS-related illnesses. They were taking on this caregiving role, and I think that helped nudge away some of the ideas that gay men are just promiscuous or some of these other stereotypes that gay men are really just focused on sex.
It also drew attention to the idea that there's this really deep sense of community, that if your family won't pay for your funeral because of these AIDS stigmas or disowning, your friends will. They will be there for you as your chosen family. This is when you see the rise of what’s called ‘the urban tribe.’ So, I do try to draw attention to those things in my courses.
YM: Excellent. Before we wrap things up, is there anything else that you want to share or think is important to say about any of the topics we’ve been discussing?
KB: One of the things I try to do when I’m teaching is—and I don’t know how successful I am at this, but I do my best—to keep my personal views or values outside of what I teach. So, it's more of just, “Here's the thing we're reading. How can I present it to you in the strongest terms possible, so you leave the class saying, ‘I didn't think I would like that view but I think there's something to it now’?” Even if next week we're doing the exact opposite, I want to try and do my best to present each one with that same type of energy.
I wasn't sure how that was going to go with the Sex, Love and God class because those are three things that people really deeply care about, myself included, but it actually turned out to be a lot better than I thought it would be. It’s almost better than any other course I've taught because there was this openness to hearing about a really compelling counterexample.
Students will tell me, ‘I guess I was only thinking about these kinds of cases before, but now that you've drawn my attention to this one…’ and likewise, the students would ask me questions, and I wouldn’t know what to say because I'd never thought about that case. So, I would tell them, ‘Why don't we just put it out there and workshop together?’ I think for me, that was one of the more rewarding classes I've ever taught because there was this mutual sense of exploring the topics together. That was just absolutely rewarding for me from a teacher point of view.
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix