The author reflects on how the Indigo Girls’ music influenced their understanding of identity and community, especially during adolescence in a restrictive environment. Their songs foster kindness, activism, and self-reflection, serving as a catalyst for personal growth and social awareness. The music is portrayed as a bridge between the secular and sacred in life.
Photo of two young people enjoying music together by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com
The practice of discerning and living into one’s callings is often deeply influenced not only by overt barriers but also by implicit messages that shape what seems possible in our lives. As a child of the 1980s, I yearned for representation that countered the oppressive gender roles in the world around me in the small northern Michigan town where I grew up. Most viscerally, I noticed my own discomfort with the pervasive narrative that I would have a husband and children someday, regardless of what my paid work would be. In my adolescence, queer life was invisible; but when I listened to music, I experienced a sense of being-in-community and was invited into self-reflection about who I was called to become.
This post emphasizes the importance of gender justice in higher education, particularly in language and pronoun use. It discusses the need for inclusive teaching methods that recognize diverse gender identities, while also critiquing traditional practices that may marginalize LGBTQIA+ students, including the compulsory sharing of pronouns. The author advocates for fostering supportive environments that promote vocational exploration for all students.
Gender justice—both in and through language—is fundamental to my vocation. As an out queer faculty member, I center the power of language, narrative, and agency in my teaching and in my mentoring relationships. My courses span topics from French language to Francophone world cultures, and LGBTQIA+ literature to queer and feminist theories. Accordingly, gender and sexuality are embedded throughout them as forces that shape our day-to-day lives, the institutions we inhabit, and their linguistic norms. At the same time, my students and I grapple collectively with how we contribute to reinforcing or disrupting these concepts and how we might activate them to empower or to constrain.
The most recent episode of Callings features a conversation with Geoffrey Bateman, associate professor of peace and justice studies at Regis University.
The most recent episode of Callings features a conversation with Geoffrey Bateman, professor of peace and justice studies at Regis University. He is also a NetVUE faculty fellow and NetVUE scholar and has written extensively on the topic of supporting LGBTQIA+ students in their vocational journeys. In addition to serving as one of the faculty advisors for the Queer Student Alliance at Regis, he also leads Brave Space Trainings for the Queer Resource Alliance. His recent scholarship includes the essays “Queer Vocation and the Uncommon Good” in Called Beyond Ourselves: Vocation and the Common Good and “Queer Callings: LGBTQ Literature and Vocation” in Cultivating Vocation in Literary Studies.
Queering our approach to advisement helps students cultivate critical dispositions and build not only resilience but also resistance to injustice, thus creating the conditions of transformative possibility for flourishing within our institutions and beyond.
In my last post, I suggested how we might better educate ourselves as advisors and support our queer students as they explore and prepare for the world of work after graduation. Many of these strategies focused on helping students navigate the homo- and transphobic contexts of work. In this post, I consider a different angle by highlighting queer theory’s disruptive potential for our students’ academic journeys and vocational discernment. Queering our approach to advisement helps students cultivate critical dispositions and build not only resilience but also resistance to injustice, thus creating the conditions of transformative possibility for flourishing within our institutions and beyond.
As educators and advisors, we best serve our queer students not by adopting a one-size-fits-all kind of approach but rather by helping them understand and articulate the relationship between their sexual and gender (and other intersecting) identities and their emerging and evolving professional interests.
A few years ago, one of my queer-identified students shared with me some resume advice they had received from a colleague in our career center: not to include their internship at an LGBTQIA+ advocacy organization because potential employers would respond negatively. This advice confused and frustrated the student. They were out, and their queer identity had played an important part in their vocational discernment. This internship had reinforced their sense of calling by clarifying and strengthening their emerging professional commitment to work in the queer community after graduation. Not surprisingly, this student wanted to know what I thought they should do.
For LGBTQIA+ persons there is an added step in a vocational journey: understanding and embracing an identity awareness in relation to the hetero-normativities that exist in society, and making peace with both its disruptiveness and its capacity to create more internal coherence. For LGBTQIA+ persons, a vocational calling is discerned most fully and clearly within the integration of their vocational journey with the process of their queer identification, which is deeply connected to an awareness of gender and sexuality in their lives. Thus, queer embodiment—the visible awareness and manifestation of their queer bodies, desires, and identities—must be an integral part of their vocational discernment.
Queer individuals are called to perceive a truth inside themselves, name it as an identity marker, reckon with it, tell the truth about it even in the face of hostility, find others who perceive a comparable identity marker, and build community for the betterment of all of us. That, to me, is the essence of a spiritual journey. It is more than that. In my faith tradition, we refer to this as a call. It is a vocation.
Rev. Elizabeth M. Edman, Queer Virtue (2016).
I have often wondered about the role that queer identity can make in a person’s vocational discernment. In what ways does queer identity become an integral part of how one discerns, what that discernment looks like, and the result of the discernment process? What is the role of eros, desire, and the body in the process of vocational discernment? Most, importantly, how can we educate students in their vocational journey to embrace an embodied discernment that includes gender, sexuality, and passion?
For any person, the process of what I have named “becoming-selfhood-in-relation” comes into being through the integration of many factors— body, mind, and spirit, as well as through social context, culture, history, and social location factors (Embracing Disruptive Coherence, p. xi). For LGBTQIA+ persons there is an added step in a vocational journey: understanding and embracing an identity awareness in relation to the hetero-normativities that exist in society, and making peace with both its disruptiveness and its capacity to create more internal coherence. For LGBTQIA+ persons, a vocational calling is discerned most fully and clearly within the integration of their vocational journey with the process of their queer identification, which is deeply connected to an awareness of gender and sexuality in their lives. Thus, queer embodiment—the visible awareness and manifestation of their queer bodies, desires, and identities—must be an integral part of their vocational discernment.
