Sexuality education has always been a queer proposition for schools. Its queerness lies in the disruption it poses to the traditional academic landscape of schooling otherwise peppered with âintellectualâ subjects like maths and science. The Cartesian dualism that structures education renders schooling the province of the mind (Paechter, 2004), with student bodies and the messiness of their sexuality an excess to be managed. As a subject which invokes the body, sexuality education sits low in the academic hierarchy of important educational knowledge. What makes sexuality education queerer still is that its focusâsexualityâis socially constituted as private, embarrassing, dangerous, sinful, and potentially pleasurable (Hawkes, 2004). These associations have shrouded it in longstanding debates about whether it should be taught, when, by whom, and what its content should be (Irvine, 2002). Sexuality educationâs queerness also lies in the disruptive potential of these debates to highlight and question conventional binaries between child/adult, innocence/knowledge, danger/pleasure, homosexual/heterosexual, and cisgender/gender diverse. For instance, when the appropriateness of content around sex and masturbation is queried for 10-year-olds, an array of dualisms surface, including child/adult, appropriate/inappropriate, and pleasure/danger. Such contentions render sexuality education a controversial subject which many parents, teachers, and students prefer to avoid. Like the reception that can haunt humans who identify as queer, sexuality education endures embarrassed coughs, uncomfortable silences, verbal violences, and a quick dismissal as conversations hurry away from it.1
Controversies that have historically plagued sexuality education can be seen to have constrained its development as an innovative curriculum area and field of research knowledge (Goldman, 2008). Gaining access to schools and ethical approval to conduct sexuality research is subsequently often laborious, as some have been made cautious of this work (Allen, 2005; Kehily, 2002). The âtroubleâ sexuality education can attract also influences the sorts of issues deemed valuable and possible to explore. These topics have often been determined and defined by adult agendas and subsequently pertain to sexual citizenship, for instance issues of sexual responsibility such as practising safer sex and education around sexual consent. To give students a voice in these debates, some researchers have spent considerable effort investigating what content they deem valuable (Alldred & David, 2007; Allen, 2011; Measor, Tiffin, & Miller, 2000). Subsequently, what should be taught and who should teach sexuality education have become regulating foci in this research.
Those who have broadened this agenda to seek justice for students whose sexual, gender, ethnic, and/or religious identity are omitted or obscured by schooling have also been caught in what has been described as a queer research cul-de-sac (Rasmussen & Allen, 2014). Despite valiant attempts to rid schools of homophobia, transphobia, and other heteronormativities, only incremental gains have been made in some pockets of education. Reviewing progress in the US over the past 20 yea rs, Garcia and Fields (2017) no ted the erosion of abstinence-only fundingâs stranglehold on sexuality education and increased policy and classroom protection for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth and teachers. Current conservative national politics, however, threaten to rescind such advances. This was recently evidenced in the North Carolina Senateâs refusal to overturn its âbathroom billâ (House Bill 2 or âHB 2â) restricting legal protections for LGBTQ people and requiring those who are transgender to use public toilets matching the gender on their birth certificate.
The effect of these constraints, I would argue, is that sexuality education research and practice has stagnated. It is caught in a cycle of habitual questions, addressed with a predictable set of tools, leading to an equally predictable set of âanswersâ. When actioned, these âanswersâ mostly deliver underwhelming results, or only fleeting changes as witnessed in legal protections for LGBTQ in the US. Predominantly, the way researchers have approached âthe problemsâ of sexuality education are via the tools of critique. Feminists, for instance (and I count myself one), have critiqued the gender bias of sexuality curricular and its failure to recognise and support diverse subjects like LGBTQ, students with disabilities, and those from minority ethnic and religious backgrounds. We have also critiqued missing discourses of desire and pleasure in sexuality education (Allen, Rasmussen, & Quinlivan, 2014), sometimes implying that their secular inclusion is âprogressiveâ against âconservativeâ and âbackwardâ religious dogma (for a critique of this approach see Rasmussen, 2016). In an intervie w with Dolphijn and Van der Tuin (2012), fem inist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad outlined what she deemed problematic about certain mobilisations of critique.
Critique is all too often not a deconstructive practice, that is, a practice of reading for the constitutive exclusions of those ideas we cannot do without, but a destructive practice meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or something downâanother scholar, another feminist, a discipline, an approach, etc. So, this is a practice of negativity that I think is about subtraction, distancing and othering. (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 49)
For sexuality education, critique has resulted in a series of stalemates around its most challenging issues. One of these is addres sed in Rasmussenâs (2016) work on sexularism. Rasmussen argues that the conceptualisation of âsecularâ critiques of sexuality education as âprogressiveâ, juxtaposed with the âbackwardnessâ of religious views, does little to move us on the issue of how to address cultural and religious diversity in sexuality classrooms. This approach can also be seen as unethical in its treatment of those who hold different views from our own, in the way it denigrates and dismisses their perspectives and implicitly cultural and religious identities. It is also an approach that has failed to satisfy on its promises of significant change, for how far has critiquing the inadequacies of sexuality education actually delivered us?
The situation in which sexuality education research finds itself is ripe for the emergence of new modes of thought (Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016). New materialism (Coole & Frost, 2010) is one such ânew modeâ this book engages to rethink sexuality education (see Chap. 2 for an explanation of new materialism). Pierre et al. (2016) trac e the conditions enabling this new theoretical frameworkâs appearance in the social sciences in a way which resonates with sexuality educationâs current predicament. The first condition is an âethical imperative to rethink the nature of being to refuse the devastating dividing practices of the dogmatic Cartesian image of thoughtâ (Pierre et al., 2016, p. 99).
The Cartesian framing of issues confronting the field of sexuality education in terms of acknowledging the inclusion/exclusion of students (on grounds of sexual, cultural, and religious diversity) and of curriculum content in terms of binaries of pleasure/danger, inappropriate/appropriate confines this subjectâs possibilities. This way of thinking institutes a set of dividing practices that are unethical in their othering of particular groups and ideas. The fieldâs failure to resolve these dilemmas creates a situation generative of Pierre et al.âs (2016) second condition, that of a heightened curiosity and accompanying experimentation. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, for these researchers, âturns [i.e., that is those which are ontological, epistemological, theoretical] become necessary when our encounters with the world can no longer be explained or justified by orthodox thinking, when new problems overtake us that demand our attention, our finest curiosity, and urgent âexperimentation in contact with the realââ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987 [1980], p. 72, cited in Pierre et al., 2016, p. 100). Sexuality education has reached this impasse, with the realisation that our current tools are not sufficient to adequately deal with its most enduring and pertinent issuesâfor instance how to cater ethically for difference (sexual, gendered, ethnic, religious, physical, to name a few such differences).
Motivated by an ethical imperative, the current book is in the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987 [1980]) âa n experiment ⊠in contact with the realâ (p. 72). That is, it is an attempt to think differently about the lived crises we have failed to adequately address in sexuality education research (e.g., how to stop homophobia, how to prevent transphobia, how to ethically engage cultural and religious diversity in the classroom). It aims to take up Pierre et al.âs (2016) que stion of âhow do we refuse a dogmatic image of thoughtâthe ordinary and unexceptional, the given, the normal, the foundationalâand imagine a different image of thoughtâ (p. 102) in relation to sexuality education? Specifically, it attempts to...