Queer sex education: Co-design for social transformation

Research output: Other contribution to conferencePresentation onlypeer-review

Abstract

Sex education researchers, sex education practitioners, and feminist and LGBTQIA+ activists have argued that sex education is intimately connected to sexual and gender justice – both for students within a school, and for wider communities (Fields, 2008; Jones, 2011; Ollis et al, 2022) . These include LGBTQIA+ inclusion and safety, sexual health and wellbeing, sexual agency and autonomy, consent and sexual violence, and violence within intimate relationships. Moving away from the focus on reproduction and the gender/heteronormative understandings of sex and relationships that have characterised both conservative and neoliberal approaches to sex education, queer and feminist approaches to sex education aim to decentre heteronormativity while focusing on consent and respectful sexual relationships, sexual health and wellbeing beyond reproduction and sexually transmitted infections, sexual agency, diverse bodies, and pleasure (Jones, 2011; Ollis et al, 2022). Moreover, queer and feminist approaches to sex education have also sought to move away from traditional didactic pedagogies and have instead been guided by principles of critical pedagogy, participatory learning, and co-design (Ollis et al, 2022). Working from these political orientations and pedagogical principles, feminist and queer sex educators aim to support the development of students’ and wider communities’ critical understandings of sex and sexuality, sexual agency, and sexual and relationship wellbeing. The hope is, in short, that these forms of sex education can serve as generative sites of social transformation towards greater gender and sexual justice.

In this discussion I aim to illuminate how these forms of sex education might function as sites of social transformation. To do so, I draw on my background as a qualified sex educator and interdisciplinary feminist researcher specialising in critical theory and sexual ethics to map the bi-directional political flows between these forms of sex education and wider sex discourses. At the centre of my analysis is the notion of counter-publics. Originating in feminist political theory (Fraser, 1990), the term “counter-public” has been utilised in the philosophy of education to describe “discursive spaces” created through alternative pedagogical approaches “that can present radical challenges to our fundamental social and political ideas” about education (Suissa, 2016, pg. 771). Building on recent feminist political philosophy (e.g., Haslanger, 2020; 2021) I extend this notion of counter-publics to refer to the politically generative spaces that queer and feminist approaches to sex education can help create. Shaped by feminist and queer politics and guided by critical pedagogy (hooks, 1994) and principles of co-design (Ollis et al, 2022), these counter-publics enable educators to go beyond didactic modes of learning that take established, heteronormative sex and sexuality discourses for granted and jointly ask with students: How do we understand, articulate, and navigate the sexual realities we inhabit? Moreover, how might we want to change those realities? I suggest that in asking and exploring these questions, those within sex-education counter-publics generate politically disruptive epistemological resources (knowledges), affective flows (shared, politically potent emotions; Ahmed, 2013) and transgressive social scripts (“blueprints” for social interactions, including sexual interactions) that can orient us towards a world that is more just in terms of sex/sexuality, gender, and sex-education.

This analysis highlights that the socially transformative potential of sex education cannot be captured by a pedagogical-political approach in which teachers transmit the “facts” of sex and reproduction, or even of consent and sexual/gender/other diversity, to a relatively audience of young people. Rather, queer and feminist sex education centring co-design creates a third space, a non-heteronormative counter-public, in which young people and educators enact agency to collaboratively produce understandings of sexual and educational social realities, creating new knowledges, scripts, and affective flows that envision and orient us to a more just social world. This insight enables a deeper understanding of the relationship between sex education and social justice and helps us better understand the educational and sexual realties at stake in political debates over sex education.

Conference

Conference20th Gender and Education Association Conference 2024
Abbreviated titleBe the change
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityPort Macquarie
Period17/06/2420/06/24
OtherThe 20th Gender and Education Association Conference will be held at Charles Sturt’s Port Macquarie Campus in partnership with the Gender and Education Association (GEA). The conference will bring together education practitioners from all levels and backgrounds to increase diversity and inclusion in education, improving equal opportunities for all in 2024.

The event will explore local, national and global inequalities in education, breaking down the one-size-fits-all approach and analysing systemic and structural barriers that have led to disadvantage among different groups.



The conference theme of ‘Be the change’ aims to be a catalyst for discussion and action to address global and institutional inequality through the power of education and knowledge.



You will need to be a member of the GEA to attend the conference. Not a member? Please visit the GEA website http://www.genderandeducation.com/join to join.

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