Boys in Religious Education - A difficult relationship?! Considering perspectives of boys in a gender-balanced pedagogy of diversity

Abstract

Religious Education never was neutral to gender; when it pretended to be so it actually supported male dominance. This outcome of research in Feminist Theology and feminist approaches to Religious Education (RE) has led to a necessary emphasis on structural discrimination of girls in school education and contributed to increasing awareness of gender bias in RE-approaches. However, academic reflection on RE has needed some time to discover boys not only in a deficit-oriented perspective as trouble makers for girls but also as subjects of religion-related learning who need critical companionship in their physical, mental and also spiritual development. One basic tenet of religious education which is directed towards gender equality should be to reflect upon and to foster manifold ways of understanding oneself in its own individual gender. This is in the same way important for boys as for girls because there seems to be a current backlash in role models with the trend of homogenizing gender roles according to mainstream frames of manlyhood and womanlyhood. Current approaches in RE reflect gender as one category of difference within a set of differences formed by social background, religion, culture and dis/ability. The challenge and task is to conceptualize RE at the intersections of these categories. The article explains how boyhood can be understood as gender-related category of difference and outlines conceptual features of a religion-related pedagogy of diversity without any discrimination based on sex, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity.