Sex Education, Sexual Labor, and Education: The Need for Alternative Sexual Pedagogies (original) (raw)
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Sexual Labors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Toward Sex as Work
What constitutes 'sex' and defines 'labor' has varied across time and space, we have learned over the last 35 years through an explosion of monographs and articles in the history and sociology of sexuality and labor studies. But rarely has the new labor studies, with its attention to gender, race, and ethnicity and its consideration of unpaid as well as paid work, put sexual labors at the center of its focus. Even the rich literature on prostitution more likely has come out of women's studies than labor studies. Similarly, scholarship on sexuality focuses more on sex acts and identities than on markets, work culture, labor standards, collective action, and occupational segregation -the stuff of labor studies. The referents and literature for these fields stand apart -despite the growth of LGBTQ caucuses in the labor movement, renewed feminist debates over sex work, and the commercialization and proliferation of sexual services and unionization of exotic dancers.
Prostitution scandals stigmatize workers for their entire lives, but the politician involved is marred for only one news cycle. “White knight” feminists shame women for sexually catering to the patriarchy but talk from a place of economic privilege. Religious organizations engage in misguided attempts to “save” women who use the industry as a job. Exploitive policies aimed at curtailing sex work hurt the individuals who wish to practice safe sex for their own protection. In the guise of aiding sex workers, or saving them from themselves, those that would advocate for more restrictive policies ignore the ramifications of what these laws would entail.
A Historical Analysis of Public School Sex Education in America Since 1900
2009
This thesis explored the history of American public school sex education since 1900. It identified key points in sex education development. Six historical events were highlighted: (1) The social hygiene and the birth control movements, (2) research by Alfred Kinsey, (3) the sexual revolution, (4) creation of SIECUS, (5) the discovery of AIDS and, 6) the reform of the welfare system. An interpretation of these factors suggested: (1) countercultural voices of previous eras have become the dominant voices in current sex education, (2) the philosophical development of "comprehensive" sex education was linked to a personal justification of unconventional sexual behaviors, (3)
The American Historical Review, 2010
With the jaunty title, Sex Goes to School, and an introductory promise "to offer a deeper understanding of the dynamic process of sex education" along with a shift "to consider adolescents' perspectives and contributions along with those of educators" (x), this book tempts a reader with possibilities. There is no doubt that Susan Freeman has done an admirable job of scouring the sources to produce an examination of the changing intent and orientation of sex education in the 1940s and 1950s in the United States. Whether the book delivers on its initial promise, however, is another matter. Sex Goes to School is a short monograph that begins by looking at the transition from a strictly biological and health-based sex education curriculum to one situated more fully in studies of family life, psychological adjustment and happy heterosexual relationships. While this argument about a move from a more morally certain age to a therapeutic present is not new to educational historians, Freeman's tracing of this history is useful and thorough. Her identification of the disagreements and conflicts that would erode the majority support for school-based sex education that she claims was present in the mid-twentieth century is thought-provoking. Once the stage has been set, the book moves to a closer examination of the ways in which sex education was developed as curriculum. In the strongest, but too short, chapter in the book, three cases are used to explore the newly developed and more open approaches to sex education of the mid-twentieth-century. While acknowledging differences among those active in leading and implementing the new sex education courses in Oregon state, Toms River, New Jersey and San Diego, California, Freeman offers a relatively clear sense of what might actually have happened in the three school jurisdictions selected. In using these examples, she provides the kind of brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Historical Studies in Education / Revue d'histoire de...
Chastity for democracy: Surplus repression and the rhetoric of sex education
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Moving from opposition to participation, the Adolescent Family Life Act (1981) and the development of abstinence education marks the conservative movement’s pivot to a rhetorical strategy of tolerance that enabled it to coopt the public culture of sex discourse. Working from Herbert Marcuse’s theory of “surplus repression,” I argue that the New Right seized the liberationist argument for open public discourse about sexuality to sublimate libidinal desires into a national project of familial (re)productivity. The AFLA is significant in the rhetorical history of sex education because it demarcates the transition to a productive form of biopolitics that sought to manage sexuality by instrumentalizing rather than censuring bodily desire. Conservative sex talk illustrates how Eros—transgressive, creative, and erotic desires—is channeled into the discursive production of hyper-functional subjects invested in their own subjugation.
Sexuality Education in the United States: Shared Cultural Ideas across a Political Divide
''Sexuality education'' – broadly defined as teaching and learning about a range of issues related to puberty, sexuality, and relationships – occurs all day every day, formally and informally, intentionally and unintentionally. Nevertheless, adults organize policy and instruction for young people around a constrained set of concerns: first, that the sexuality education youth receive does not help them navigate an increasingly sexualized and dangerous world and, second, that the lessons are themselves damaging, exacerbating the risks youth and children already face. I discuss sexuality education's entanglement with these conventional cultural ideas about youth, sexuality, and education. I consider the ways that abstinence-only and comprehensive school-based sexuality education rest on a series of a discursive framings, including a commitment to regulating sexuality and youth, a contemporary ''moral panic'' that renders all talk about youth and sexuality provocative, and normative and instrumental conceptions of teaching and learning about sexuality. I conclude by discussing the implications of these discursive framings for classroom practice and imagining an alternative model in which sexuality education might embrace ambiguity and ambivalence as a necessary and even welcome condition of young people's sexuality and education.