The queerness of education: Rethinking Catholic schooling beyond identity

Catholic education in formalised settings such as schools is often tied to the preservation of multiple modes of Catholic identities, from more traditionalist conceptions of what it means to "be" Catholic to more plural and open-ended perspectives. The association of Catholic schooling with Catholic identities is often appealed to in responding to the supposed tensions that exist between religion and queerness: what it means to "be" Catholic is often seen as the reason for either solidifying or disrupting the religious/queer divide as it plays out in school. The purpose of this paper is to take issue with both approaches on the grounds that both continue to tie Catholic schooling with Catholic identity, something which I argue risks sustaining the religious/queer divide through identity's dependence on already existing modes of (religious and queer) identification. With the view to responding to this trend, I argue that what needs to be foregrounded in discussions around religion, queerness, and Catholic schooling is the queerness of education itself, that is, education's role in transforming extant social and religious structures by providing opportunities for students to disidentify from the current state of things. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of this for understanding the "distinctiveness" of the Catholic school, and the role of "faith formation" therein.