Restricted accessResearch articleFirst published online 2003-01
Contesting the Borders of the Imagined Nation: The Frame of Religious Marginalization in Grassroots Socially Conservative Discourses about Sexuality in Public Education
This article examines the social construction of community through a discursive analysis of the cognitive frames used by socially conservative participants involved in conflicts about multicultural education in two case studies. The primary frame explored is that of religious marginalization. Within this frame, socially conservative activists produce texts that reify an ideological boundary between the values of social conservatives and those groups perceived as symbolic threats, primarily public educators and sexual minorities. Since one of the most controversial issues in contemporary conflicts about multicultural education is the role of religion and sexuality in the public schools, this article contends that the domain of the private sphere (religion, race, gender, and sexuality) is a central component of socially conservative constructs of nation and community.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Allison, Clinton. 1995. Present and past: Essays for teachers in the history of education. New York: Peter Lang.
Anti-Defamation League. 1994. The religious right: The assault on tolerance & pluralism in America. New York: Anti-Defamation League.
4.
Aronowitz, Stanley, and Henry Giroux. 1985. Education under siege: The conservative, liberal, and radical debate over schooling. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.
5.
Benford, Robert. 1997. An insider’s critique of the social movement framing perspective. Sociological Inquiry, 67: 409-30.
6.
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1993. The rites of assent: Transformations in the symbolic construction of America. New York: Routledge.
7.
Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckman. 1966. The social construction of reality. New York: Doubleday.
8.
Bolton, Richard. 1992. Introduction. In Culture wars: Documents from the recent controversies in the arts, edited by R. Bolton. New York: New Press.
9.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. 1990. Reproduction in education, society and culture. London: Sage.
10.
Christian Coalition. 1994. America at the crossroads. Chesapeake, VA: Christian Coalition Videocassettes.
11.
Cohen, Jean. 1985. Strategy or identity: New theoretical paradigms and contemporary social movements. Social Research52:663-716.
12.
Diamond, Sara. 1989. Spiritual warfare: The politics of the Christian right. Boston: South End.
13.
Dumm, Thomas. 1994. United States. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
14.
Edelman, Murray. 1988. Constructing the political spectacle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
15.
Entman, Robert. 1993. Framing: Toward a clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication43(4): 51-58.
16.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. London: Longman.
17.
Gamson, William. 1988. Political discourse and collective action. International Social Movement Research1:219-44.
18.
———. 1992. The social psychology of collective action. In Frontiers in social movement theory, edited by A. D. Morris and C. McClung. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
19.
Garber, Linda. 1997. E-town board is right. Lancaster New Era, 20 February, 8.
20.
Garrett, Peter, and Allen Bell. 1998. Media and discourse: A critical overview. In Approaches to media discourse, edited by P. Garrett and A. Bell. London: Blackwell.
21.
Gerbner, George. 1964. Mass communication and popular conceptions of education: A crosscultural study. Urbana: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Institute of Communication Research.
22.
Giroux, Henry. 1994. Doing cultural studies: Youth and the challenge of pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review64:278-308.
23.
Gottfried, Paul, and Thomas Fleming. 1988. The conservative movement. Boston: Twayne.
24.
Haiman, Franklyn. 1987. School censors and the law. Communication Education36(4): 327-37.
25.
Hall, Stuart. 1988. The rediscovery of “ideology”: Return of the repressed in media studies. In Culture, society and the media, edited by M. Gurevitch et al. London: Methuan.
26.
Hixson, William. 1992. Searching for the American right wing: An analysis of the social science record. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
27.
Irvine, Janice. 1994. A place in the rainbow: Theorizing lesbian and gay culture. Sociological Theory12(2): 232-48.
28.
Iyengar, Shanto. 1991. Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
29.
Jamieson, Kathleen. 1987. Protections from censorship. Communication Education36 (4): 402.
30.
Kress, Gunther. 2001. From Saussure to critical sociolinguistics: The turn towards a social view of language. In Discourse theory and practice: A reader, edited by M. Wetherell, S. Taylor, and S. Yates. London: Sage.
31.
Lugg, Catherine. 1998. The religious right and public education: The paranoid politics of homophobia. Educational Policy13:267-83.
32.
Marshall, Margaret. 1995. Contesting cultural rhetoric: Public discourse and education 1890-1900. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
33.
McCarthy, Cameron. 1994. Multicultural discourses and curriculum reform: A critical perspective. Educational Theory44(winter): 81-98.
Morrow, Raymond, and Carlos Torres. 1994. Education and the reproduction of class, gender, and race: Responding to the postmodern challenge. Educational Theory44 (winter):43-61.
36.
Mukerji, Chandra, and Michael Schudson. 1991. Introduction. In Rethinking popular culture, edited by C. Mukerji and M. Schudson. Berkeley: University of California Press.
37.
Norton, Anne. 1993. Republic of signs: Liberal theory and American popular culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
38.
People for the American Way. 1997. A right wing and a prayer: The religious right and your public schools. Washington, DC: People for the American Way.
39.
Schudson, Michael. 1994. Textbook politics. Journal of Communication44:43-51.
40.
Shapiro, Svy. 1992. Lost for words: The public discourse in education. Education and Society10:15-40.
41.
Smith, Christian. 1996. Disruptive religion: The force of faith in social movement activism. New York: Routledge.
42.
Sotillo, Susana, and Dana Starace-Nastaci. 1999. Political discourse of a working-class town. Discourse & Society10 (3): 411-38.
43.
Stubbs, Michael. 1992. Discourse analysis. The sociolinguistic analysis of natural language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
44.
Tarrow, Sidney. 1992. Mentalities, political cultures, and collective action frames: Constructing meaning through action. In Frontiers in social movement theory, edited by A. D. Morris and C. McClung. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
45.
Taylor, Victoria, and Nancy Whittier. 1992. Collective identity in social movement communities: Lesbian feminist mobilization. In Frontiers in social movement theory, edited by A. D. Morris and C. McClung. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
46.
Tracy, Karen, and Catherine Ashcraft. 2001. Crafting policies about controversial values: How wording disputes manage a group dilemma. Journal of Applied Communication Research29(4): 297-316.
47.
Turner, Graham. 1991. British cultural studies: An introduction. New York: Routledge.
48.
U.S. Census Bureau. 2000. Census 2000 redistricting data. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.
49.
van Dijk, Teun. 1993. Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society4 (fall): 249-83.
50.
———. 1998. Opinions and ideologies in the press. In Approaches to media discourse, edited by A. Bell and P. Garrett. London: Blackwell.
51.
———. 2001. Principles of critical discourse analysis. In Discourse theory and practice: A reader, edited by M. Wetherell, S. Taylor, and S. Yates. London: Sage.
52.
Wetherell, Margaret. 2001. Themes in discourse research: The case of Diana. In Discourse theory and practice: A reader, edited by M. Wetherell, S. Taylor, and S. Yates. London: Sage.
