CONFLICTING DISCOURSES OF ‘DEMOCRACY’ AND ‘EQUALITY’: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE LANGUAGE OF PRO- AND ANTI-LGBTQ+ INCLUSION IN THE RELATIONSHIPS AND SEX EDUCATION GUIDANCE FOR SCHOOLS IN ENGLAND

ABSTRACT New statutory Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) guidance for schools in England was published in 2019. One of the major revisions since the preceding version has been the new inclusion of LGBTQ+ identities and relationships. Some groups in the UK have recently protested against this inclusion of positive teaching about LGBTQ+ identities and relationships, suggesting that, although there is overwhelming support for the new guidance, there are still groups in society who are opposed to democratic teaching about this dimension of equality. Focusing on publicly-available video recordings of the protests, this article firstly critically analyses the key discursive strategies deployed by the anti-LGBTQ+ protest groups to produce discrimination and denial. I then compare the language used by the protest groups against the language used by other UK groups who support and continue to campaign for LGBTQ+ inclusion in RSE. Positive discourse analysis, as a progressive dimension of critical discourse analysis, is used to examine how the language used by these groups functions to resist the discriminatory discourse used by the anti-LGBTQ+ groups analysed in the first part of the article. Analysis of the discourse used by the two sets of groups reveals conflicting discourses around what is perceived to constitute ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ in the context of LGBTQ+ inclusion and schools, suggesting that these are fragile concepts in the current British political climate.

摘要 英格兰地区学校的法定关系与性教育（Relationships and Sex Education, RSE）全新指导纲要于2019年正式发布。相较于此前版本，本次修订的核心改动之一，便是首次将LGBTQ+身份与关系纳入指导范畴。近期英国部分团体针对将LGBTQ+身份与关系的正向教学纳入该纲要一事发起抗议，他们声称尽管新指导纲要获得了绝大多数民众的支持，但社会中仍有部分群体反对在平等维度开展此类符合民主原则的教学活动。本文以公开可获取的抗议活动影像资料为研究样本，首先批判性剖析反LGBTQ+抗议团体所采用的核心话语策略，以探究其如何制造歧视与否认言论。随后，本文将抗议团体的话语，与英国其他支持并持续倡导在RSE中纳入LGBTQ+内容的团体所使用的话语进行对比分析。作为批判性话语分析的前沿分支，积极话语分析被用于考察上述支持团体的话语如何发挥作用，以抵制本文第一部分所分析的反LGBTQ+团体的歧视性话语。对两类团体话语的分析显示，在学校教育纳入LGBTQ+内容的语境下，双方围绕“民主”与“平等”的定义存在截然对立的话语分歧，这表明在当前英国政治环境中，这两个概念的内涵正处于脆弱的处境之中。