T

Interpretation—“substantial” requires creating a new program.

Redwoods.edu no date
[https://inside.redwoods.edu/deancouncil/documents/Marla.SubstantialvsNonsubstantialChange.pdf] Calculus BC

SUBSTANTIAL CHANGE A new program based upon an active proposal. This action will initiate a new
control number.

Violation: the aff modifies existing sex education standards and programs
Vote neg:
Limits—justifies an infinite number of affs that make minor changes to existing
education programs—allows hyperspecific and small affs with massive
advantage areas—explodes neg research burden
Ground—modifications to existing programs destroy DA and mechanism
counterplan ground—destroys link uniqueness contextual counterplan solvency
Topicality is a voter for fairness and education
 CP
The Fifty United States and all relevant territories should eliminate funding for
abstinence-only sex education and fully fund sexual education programs that
meet the criteria established by the Real Education for Healthy Youth Act.

States are key to education and preventing “one size fits all” programs. The CP
also aligns responsibility and moves towards a more practical decision calculus.
Kelly and Hess 9/15/2015 [Andrew P. Kelly is a resident scholar and director of the Center on Higher Education
Reform at the American Entrprise Institute. Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise
Institute and author of the new book, “Letters to a Young Education Reformer.” More Than a Slogan Here are five good reasons
federalism is so important in education. https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/2015/09/15/5-reasons-federalism-in-
education-matters] Calculus BC

It's a matter of size. Education advocates suffer from severe bouts of Finland and Singapore
envy. They tend to ignore that most of these nations have populations of 5 million or so, or about
the population of Maryland or Massachusetts. Trying to make rules for schools in a nation that's
as large and diverse as the U.S. is simply a different challenge. ADVERTISING It aligns
responsibility and accountability with authority. One problem with tackling education reform
from Washington is that it's not members of Congress or federal bureaucrats who are charged
with making things work or who are held accountable when they don't. Instead, responsibility and
blame fall on state leaders and on the leaders in those schools, districts and colleges who do the
actual work. The more authority moves up the ladder in education, the more this divide worsens.
It steers decisions towards the practical. No Child Left Behind promised that 100 percent of
students would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. President Barack Obama wants to
ensure that all students can attend community college for "free" – though most of the funds would
come from states. It's easy for D.C. politicians to make grand promises and leave the
consequences to someone else. State leaders must balance the budget and are answerable to
voters for what happens in schools and colleges; this tends to make them more pragmatic in
pursuing reform. [READ: The Best Way to Boost GDP: Education?] When policymakers are embedded in a
community, as mayors and state legislators are, there is also more trust and opportunity for
compromise. That kind of practicality might disappoint firebrands eager for national solutions, but it's a better bet for students
than the wish lists and airy promises of Beltway pols. It leaves room for varied approaches to problem-solving.
One of the perils of trying to "solve" things from Washington is that we wind up with one-size-
fits-all solutions. No Child Left Behind emerged from a wave of state-based efforts to devise
testing and accountability systems. Those state efforts were immensely uneven, but they allowed
a variety of approaches to emerge, yielding the opportunity to learn, refine and reinvent. That's
much more difficult when Washington is seeking something that can be applied across 50 states. It
ensures that reform efforts actually have local roots. The Obama administration's Race to the Top program convinced lots of states to
promise to do lots of things. The results have been predictably disappointing. Rushing to adopt teacher evaluation systems on a
political timeline, states have largely made a hash of the exercise. Free college proposals make the same mistake; they depend on
states and colleges promising to spend more money and adopt federally sanctioned reforms, an approach that seems destined to
frustrate policymakers' best-laid plans. [READ: Knowledge Is Literacy] To be sure, local control has its downsides. Local school
politics tend to be dominated by interests like teachers unions. School boards are often parochial and shortsighted. And the federal
government is uniquely positioned to do some jobs that states can't, like providing a national bully pulpit to spotlight problems,
funding research and promoting interstate transparency. The feds also have opportunities to take on the dominance of entrenched local
interests by playing a "trust-busting" role. Federal recognition of alternative approaches like charter schools, nontraditional teacher
licensure programs and innovative postsecondary programs can challenge incumbents' privileged market position. Federal funding is
another trust-busting lever; wherever possible, reformers should ensure that public dollars flow to students and families and empower
them to choose. Rather than write prescriptive rules that all schools must obey, trust-busting
gives local problem-
solvers an opportunity to change politics and policy from the bottom up. But the feds are not well
equipped to fix schools. More to the point, getting Washington involved undermines the many
benefits of state-driven reform in our federal system. Limiting the federal government's role in
education isn't a slogan, it's a way to ensure that American education is both accountable to the
public and dynamic enough to meet today's challenges.

States solve better—sex ed policy is decentralized

Kaiser 02 [Kaiser Family Foundation. March 2002. “Sex Education in the U.S.: Policy and Politics.” The Henry J. Kaiser
Family Foundation. https://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2000/09/3224-sex-education-in-the-us-policy-and-
politics.pdf. SH]

Despite these federal efforts, sex education policy is mostly decentralized. And, since states may
have multiple policies governing the teaching of sex education, the overall policy picture is fairly complex. For
example, states that require that sex education be taught may vary considerably in terms of what, if
any, curriculum they specify. Meanwhile, a state that has no specific policy on sex education may still “recommend” that
educators take a particular course of action or even specify that a school district opting to offer sex education adhere to a particular
curriculum. Even within an individual state, there may be differing policies governing mandates for
education about contraception or abstinence and instruction on HIV/AIDS and other STDs. In fact,
more states require schools to offer specific HIV or STD education than general sex education. It is also common for states
to have different requirements for students in different grade levels. These policy distinctions
among and within states are often lost in the larger debate about sex education. As of December 1, 2001,
22 states require that students receive sex education and thirty-eight states require that students receive instruction about HIV/STDs:14
• Twenty-one (21) states require schools to provide both sex education as well as instruction on HIV/STDs (AK, DE, FL, GA, HI, IL,
IA, KS, KY, MD, MN, NV, NJ, NC, RI, SC, TN, UT, VT, WV, WY). • Seventeen (17) states require instruction about HIV/STDs, but
not sex education (AL, CA, CT, ID, IN, MI, MS, NH, NM, NY, ND, OH, OK, OR, PA, WA, WI). • One state requires sex education,
but not STD instruction (ME). Specific requirements about what should be taught are also on the books in
a number of states. Thirty-four (34) states require local school districts that offer sex education to
teach about abstinence: Nine require that it be covered (CT, DE, FL, GA, KY, MI, NJ, VT, VA) and twenty require that it be
stressed (AL, AZ, AK, CA, HI, IL, IN, LA, MD, MS, MO, NC, OK, OR, RI, SC, TN, TX, UT, WV). In addition, thirteen of
these states require local school districts that do offer sex education to cover information about
contraception (AL, CA, DE, HI, MD, MO, NJ, OR, RI, SC, VT, VA, WV), but no state requires that birth control information be
emphasized. Thirty-five states (35) give parents some choice as to whether or not their children can receive sex education or STD
instruction (AL, AZ, CA, CT, FL, GA, ID, IL, IA, KS, LA, MD, MA, MI, MN, MS, MO, MT, NJ, NV, NY, NC, OK, OR, PA, RI,
SC, TN, TX, VT, VA, UT, WA, WV, WI).15 Most of these states give parents the option of withdrawing their children from the
courses. Three of these states (AZ, NV, UT) say that parents must actively consent before the instruction begins, while one of these
(AZ) has an opt-out policy for STD education while requiring parental consent for sex education. Of the states with “opt-out” policies,
five require that it be due to a family’s religious or moral beliefs.
 K
The aff is indebted to an educational futurism where the figural Child tames the
queer excess of childhood in favor of projecting a coherent subject that sustains
the nation
Greteman & Wojcikiewicz 2014 [ Adam J., Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art Education at
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Steven K., Assistant Professor in the College of
Education at Western Oregon University | “The Problems with the Future: Educational Futurism
and the Figural Child” Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2014]
‘I touch the future’, Christa McAuliffe said, ‘I teach’. This resonates with educators. By passing on skills, knowledge,
and ideas that will be used at later times, they reach out to an unseen future and touch it. Teachers tell their
students to study and work hard, for the things they are learning will be needed in the future. The lesson of the day may be applied to a
test at the end of the week, or it may be the basis for work that will be carried out at the next grade level. It may even help prepare a
learning now
student for college, or for a job, or for a fulfilling life. Whatever the specifics, the commonality here is that
prepares students for a yet unknown then. Teaching and schooling are suffused with concern
about, discussion of, and focus on the future. This theme of futurity carries on beyond school walls and
enters political discourse on education. President John F. Kennedy noted, ‘Children are the world’s most valuable
resource and its best hope for the future’, while Malcolm X claimed ‘education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to
those who prepare for it today’. But, education
is not merely directed toward the future of the individual,
but also toward the future of the nation. A Nation at Risk, the oft-quoted 1983 US Department of Education report on
the state of American education, tells us that, People are steadfast in their belief that education is the major foundation for the future
strength of this country. They even considered education more important than developing the best industrial system or the strongest
military force, perhaps because they understood education as the cornerstone of both . . . Very clearly, the public understands the
primary importance of education as the foundation for a satisfying life, an enlightened and civil society, a strong economy, and a
secure Nation (National Commission on Excellence in Education, The Public’s Commitment section, 1983, para. 2). Close to 20 years
after the publication of A Nation at Risk, the most sweeping educational reform effort of our time, No
Child Left Behind,
returned the focus back to the Child, continuing the focus on the future in education and the
necessity of the Child to maintain the competitiveness of the nation. As former president George W. Bush
asserted in one of his last speeches in office, NCLB, . . . starts with this concept: Every child can learn. We believe that it is important
to have a high quality education if one is going to succeed in the 21st century. It’s no longer acceptable to be cranking people out of
the school system and saying, okay, just go—you know, you can make a living just through manual labor alone. That’s going to
happen for some, but it’s not the future of America, if we want to be a competitive nation as we head into the 21st century (Bush,
2009, para. 22). And more recently, President Obama, in a speech when he was running for the office, asserted, ‘We are the nation that
has always understood that our future is inextricably linked to the education of our children’ (Obama, 2008, para. 10). Along the same
lines, the current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has stated that, ‘Today, more than ever, better schooling provides a down
payment on the nation’s future’ (Duncan, 2009, para. 15). Within
these statements, the future cannot be separated
from those it relies on—predominately ‘children’. These assumptions made in regards to children,
their role in the future, and schools’ roles in creating that future are seemingly ingrained in our
society and our politics. The presence of this future focus may seem uncontroversial, its influence benign. Such assumptions
may appear to be natural and beyond question, particularly since this futurist-focus originated, in part, with the spread of education
during the Enlightenment, with its progress-oriented philosophical perspectives. Yet, we wish to question these assumptions, to
explore how they can set narrow boundaries around children in schools. In carrying out this task, we employ the work of Lee Edelman
and John Dewey to examine the educational ramifications of the focus on the future, which we call ‘educational futurism’ after
Edelman’s (2004) ‘reproductive futurism’. Our argument seeks specifically to explore how educational
futurism imposes
limits on educational discourse and privileges a certain future, thus making it unthinkable to
imagine ways outside of such a privileged future. We turn to Edelman for his ‘reproductive futurism’, which is
embodied in the regulatory figure of ‘the Child’, because it is seems particularly apt to the educational settings, practices and
discourses which are our concern. This
‘figural Child’ for Edelman ‘alone embodies the citizen as an ideal,
entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of
limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed’ (2004, p. 11). The Child exists in discourse and it limits discourse from
engaging the unruly lives of children.
The Child, for Edelman, is not representative of children. It is all there is.
And actions
taken in the name of the Child ignore, even exclude, the particularities and contexts that
make children who they are—alive and unique. Edelman’s challenge then offers up a threat to education’s identification
with the Child, a challenge that is not simply nihilistic, but which rather aims to see what is denied consideration and action. His
project, heavily reliant on Lacan’s death drive, offers a challenge to ‘a future whose beat goes on’ to expose
the way ‘the political regime of futurism, unable to escape what it abjects, negates it as the
negation of meaning, of the Child, and of the future the Child portends’ (pp. 153–154). He insists, as such,
on a politics that does not seek accommodation within such logic but an embrace of the negation, the unintelligible place of queerness,
for it is in such an embrace that queer ethics can engage the violence against non-normative bodies. Dewey makes an appearance here
because, though he has been narrowly and inaccurately portrayed as the benign father of student-centred, activity-oriented, open, and
laissez-faire classroom methods, his positions are far more nuanced, and far more radical, in relation to children and the future
(Dewey, 1938; Petrovic, 1998; Popkewitz, 2005; Prawat, 1995; Schleffler, 1974; Wong and Pugh, 2001). He presents a critique of a
future focus in education that shows how such a focus means a loss, not only of present opportunities, but also of the promised future
for children. Dewey, read in relation to Edelman’s engagement with futurism, offers a place within educational discourse to explore
the possibility to engage educational futurism in ways that challenge the discourse of the Child illustrated in our opening statements.
To focus on Dewey’s radical insights then is to challenge the innocent position to which he is often relegated. After all, it is the
innocent Dewey, like the innocent Child, that supports and carries forward the status quo. Our focus on the radical insights of Dewey
position him against the status quo, and against the Child, bringing a different, though complementary, perspective to our engagement
with Edelman. Before moving forward, we would like to note that our approach in this analysis is not entirely new. As a critique of
futurism, it questions a general characteristic of modernism, namely, a foundational belief that we will get ‘there’ someday
(Lagemann, 2000). This belief asserts that wherever there might be, and in whatever endeavour we are engaged in, the point is that
progress is possible and that our actions can be justified in the name of the inevitable and promising, though distant, end. This belief,
the heart of futurism, has, in this postmodern time, been challenged on many occasions. Our argument, however, seeks specifically to
explore how futurism, expressed through the iterative construction of the Child, shapes the ways that we can think about children and
education. We will begin our analysis by describing Edelman’s reproductive futurism and its relation to education specifically. In this
we will address Edelman’s the notion of the Child, the Child’s relation to children, and the impact of these concepts on education.
Following this we will introduce John Dewey’s views of growth, life, and education, and show how these views can be read to engage
a similar critique of the role of the future and the workings of normative or regulatory subjects.With our two theorists in place, we will
seek to draw out connections and disconnections between them, illustrating the ways in which educational futurism ignores or
overlooks the lived experiences of children. We conclude by briefly noting the queerness of children and the impact of such queerness
on broadening discussions of the future of children. EDELMAN’S REPRODUCTIVE FUTURISM AND THE CHILD Edelman, in
his book No Future (2004) uses queerness as a stance to critique, and resist, what he calls ‘reproductive
futurism’. He lays out the boundaries of reproductive futurism as, . . . terms that impose an ideological limit on
political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by
rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this
organizing principle of communal relations (2004, p. 2). Edelman claims that reproductive futurism sets
the notion of reproduction, along with its complementary and concurrent idea of looking to the future, as
dominant, even natural, guides for being and acting in the political realm. Because of this dominance,
anything which lies outside of this brand of futurism lies outside of the pale of political thought and
action. It is, in short, unintelligible. Reproductive futurism acts, in Edelman, through ‘the Child’, an image, an
identity, and a political tool that he refers to as the ‘privileged embodiment’ of the future (Edelman, 2007, p. 471). ‘We are
no more able to conceive of politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to
conceive of a future without the figure of the Child (2004, p. 11). The Child creates a logic by which the
political, within contemporary American politics, ‘must be thought’ (p. 2), since: . . . however radical the means by which specific
constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a
structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of it inner Child (pp. 2–3, italics in
original). It is the Child that shapes and inspires social and political action, action which is aimed at a future
for the Child, and this underpins any ideology in contemporary politics. Edelman’s critique seeks to challenge
this to embrace the negativity of that which is negated by the Child to disrupt the narrative trajectory the Child maintains and engage
the unruly. Edelman’s critique and exposure of the Child and the Child’s structuring logic illustrates that the Child is exclusionary, de-
legitimising all that which is not future-focused, or which does not benefit the Child in all its innocent, sentimentalised, and
decontextualised (non)identity. The Child takes up the whole frame, permitting nothing else to be seen,
recognised, or thinkable. However, Edelman makes it clear that the Child he writes of is figural and therefore ‘not to be
confused with the lived experiences of any historical children’ (p. 11). Rather the figural Child ‘serves to regulate
political discourse—to prescribe what we count as political discourse—by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to
the reality of a collective future whose figurative status we are never permitted to acknowledge or address’ (p. 11). In order to reveal
the Child, and the full range of the meanings of the Child for discourse and action, Edelman (2004) proposes the ‘unthinkable’: he
threatens the Child by queering it, since ‘queerness names the side of those not “fighting for the children”, the side outside the
consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism’ (p. 3). In queering the Child, these hidden
discourses and contexts are exposed, and the Child is portrayed, not as the widely and easily accepted stand-in for children, but as an
oppressive figure that closes down possibility and denies particularity, all in the name of a future that ‘is mere repetition and just as
lethal as the past’, a future that is normatively, narrowly defined but never to be reached. (p. 31). It is important to understand, in this
analysis, that to queer the Child in the name of children is, by extension, to put children in the position of the queer. This, in turn,
opens up many possibilities. Yet, making the claim that children are queer may provoke anxiety, or outrage because of the reach of the
figural Child. Such a statement on the queerness of children, especially in the realm of education, disrupts the innocence of the Child
as imagined and portrayed. It challenges the frame that sets the Child up as in need of a proper curriculum, in need of protection.
Edelman acknowledges as much noting that, ‘for the cult of the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys and girls, since
queerness, for contemporary culture at large . . . is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end’ (p. 19). Such anxiety, or
even outrage, is useful for our purposes, for it helps reveal the contextualised, complex, and perhaps troubling realities that lie beneath
the bland image of the Child. The Child is not an innocent position. The Child is indeed the representative
of positions that have been utilised politically to assault and reject those who do not support the
Child. The stories that have been told about the Child have followed a narrow narrative trajectory and to take a stand against the
Child is to offer different stories, different narrative trajectories, and challenges to the future. In offering a challenge to this dominant
story line on the Child asks that we stand against the maintenance of innocence, for it is its maintenance that inhibits experience and
learning (Archard, 2004; Bruhm and Hurley, 2004; Buckingham, 2000). This
maintenance of innocence on the part of
the Child is an important piece of what separates the Child from children, and what makes the
political Child such a totalising force for the suppression of children. This Child is one who is always
innocent, always protected, and, as the potential for anxiety and outrage already mentioned alludes to, always inexperienced.
Experience taints, disrupts, and ends innocence. And yet, experience itself is a vital characteristic
of learning. Thus children in schools, those who are learning, are always already in a queer position. The
Child’s image of innocence is merely an exclusionary political position, ‘a central reference point in a wider mythology of childhood
that helps uphold an unjust moral order in which both adults and children are subject to the oppressive politics of purity’ (Davis, 2011,
p. 381). To argue against the Child and its innocence is to open up that which the Child closes off, the real experiences and desires of
children. DEWEY’S FOCUS ON GROWTH AND THE PRESENT IN EDUCATION John Dewey did not write about Queer Theory,
or about the Child, but he did write about experience, and about how the political and educational discourses and actions of his day
acted to deny the realities and experiences of children in the name of a future that would never be realised. Dewey’s ideas on
education are rooted in his overall concern with growth. He equated education with growth, and growth with life (Dewey, 1916, 1934/
1980, 1938; Granger, 2000; Hansen, 2000). This would, at first glance, seem itself to be a future-focused position, but Dewey adds
that both education and growth must proceed for their own sakes. ‘Since growth is the characteristic of life’, he claims, ‘education is
all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself’ (Dewey, 1916, p. 53). However, if
growth is ‘regarded as having an
end, instead of being an end’ (1916, p. 50, italics in original), problems arise. This conception of growth
arises when childhood is treated as an imperfect state during which children are moving toward
adulthood, the end of growth in the future. Dewey pushed against the notion that children were incomplete adults, and
that education was merely a matter of preparation for the future. The idea that growth has an end violates Dewey’s
ideas about growth, life, and education. Furthermore, it leads to a whole host of problems in schooling, all of which come down to the
fallacious idea of viewing schooling as preparation for the fixed future of adulthood rather than as an end in itself. With
a fixed
end in mind as to the results of education, the goal of education becomes not openness and growth, but
conformity: Since conformity is the aim, what is distinctively individual in a young person is brushed aside, or regarded as a
source of mischief or anarchy. Conformity is made equivalent to uniformity. Consequently, there are induced lack of interest in the
novel, aversion to progress, and dread of the uncertain and the unknown. Since the end of growth is outside of and beyond the process
of growing, external agents have to be resorted to, to induce movement toward it (Dewey, 1916, pp. 50–51). This conformity
reins in the excess, the aspects of the individual that do not speak to a future already structured by
the logic of conformity. In doing so, there occurs a refusal to engage that which is unknown or uncertain. Dewey’s
engagement here asked to open the bounded-ness of the Child to the excesses, the unruliness of
children’s experience. This, as Dewey noted, might be regarded as ‘mischief’ or ‘anarchy’
because such states challenge the futurism of an education that imagines a fixed end or telos. As
such, education for the future neglects the present, including the powers of present learning in terms of interest and motivation. Such
external motivators to learn become ingrained in school systems, which then swing between harsh
and open methods, without changing their essential nature as future-focused and structured by the
logic of the Child. This swinging pendulum, rather than creating a challenge to the structures of education, leads to deadening
systems of learning reiterating the centrality of the figural Child. Dewey notes this in regards to systems in punishment where,
Everybody knows how largely systems of punishment have had to be resorted to by educational systems which neglect present
possibilities in behalf of preparation for a future. Then, in disgust with the harshness and impotency of this method, the pendulum
swings to the opposite extreme, and the dose of information required against some later day is sugar-coated, so that pupils may be
fooled into taking something which they do not care for (Dewey, 1916, p. 55). For Dewey, then, the future is driven by the present.
Educational experiences which lead to growth, valued for their own sakes and on their own terms, prepare students for a future which
is undefined, but which will certainly consist of further experiences. To set a definite future is to eliminate the idea of growth for its
own sake, and to set a course for conformity. And with a definite future acting as a static goal, with only conformity to look forward
to, present experience becomes so devoid of creativity, liveliness and appeal that behaviour management techniques are the only
recourse of the educator who hopes to keep students involved in their schoolwork. Dewey thus provides a telling challenge to the
schools of his time and to the schools of today, and gives us a critique of educational futurism that describes its classroom outcomes.
Far from being a mere supporter of student-centred pedagogical activities, Dewey emerges as a radical critic of any educational
practice that relies on bribery or compulsion to make up for a lack of the sort of compelling experiences that engage students in the
immediate and, by promoting growth, prepare them for future experiences. For Dewey, the cost of educational futurism was a
deadened classroom where carrots and sticks are the dominant features, and where the end is a static and ever-unreachable goal of
‘adulthood’, a modernist dream of perfect knowledge where all the pain and preparation of schooling experiences finally pays off, and
a goal to which the present is blithely sacrificed. DEWEY AND EDELMAN IN CONVERSATION For both Dewey and
Edelman, the drive toward the future begins with the positioning of children relative to some
regulatory figural ideal. Edelman identifies this ideal as the figural Child, while Dewey identifies it as the state of adulthood,
which may also be characterised as the figural Adult. This positioning creates notions of children that are merely incomplete, either
because they are waiting to grow up, or because they are not supposed to grow up at all. Dewey’s idealised Adult never changes
because adulthood is never reached. Edelman’s idealised Child, actually an idealised present projected forward into an ever-receding
future, is unchanging, as it always stands for what is to come in the name of those who will, in later days, no longer be children. The
Child must always remain a Child in order to retain its power as a driving symbol. Yet, as such it is frozen, an identity every bit as
static as Dewey’s Adult. Because of the ways that these theories intersect, we can bring Dewey and Edelman together to focus on the
figure of the Child in educational discourse and practice, taking reproductive futurism, the Child, Dewey’s Adult, and his call for an
education valuable in the present to offer a different story for education and children. In many ways, these theories fit well together.
Children, after all, go to school, and so it is to be expected that the figure of the Child might loom large in education. And, as we have
already established, education can be seen as a largely future directed activity driven by the Child, whether that future is the future
application of a lesson, the future life of a student, or the future success or failure of the nation. It is, we maintain, even as naturally
future-directed as reproduction. And the
Child, the representative of reproductive futurism, is as directly
associated with schooling as with reproduction; both reproduce the next generation, one through
birth, the other through instruction but both reproductions are reigned in, fearful of the excessive,
the unique, the individual. For all that, we do not wish to imply that Edelman and Dewey occupy interchangeable positions.
The differences between the Child and the Adult may reflect cultural and temporal differences, a movement from a society which
viewed childhood as incomplete adulthood to one which views adulthood as, at best, childhood carried forward. These differences
may also come from the sources of these theories, their very different views and approaches to politics, or even from Edelman’s queer
stance and focus on opposition to reproduction versus Dewey’s straight stance with its faith in progress, though a progress that lacks a
Both show the
set and static end. For all their differences, however, Edelman and Dewey still share much of an outlook.
experience of the now, with all of its uncontrolled, excessive possibilities, unregulated desires and
unknown ends, brought under control, and thus deadened, by references to a totalising image that
controls political and educational discourse and action. Dewey puts forth the idea that the immediate experiences
of childhood are being sacrificed to a fixed and unreachable Adult. For Dewey, children being educated were never meant to
completely know themselves, and as such continually experience, struggle with and against the world. Edelman’s critique raises the
possibility that the immediate experiences of childhood are structured by the logic of the Child while also present a possible threat to
the perfect and innocent image of the Child. For Edelman, the Child regulates experiences for children and adults to maintain its logic,
a logic that structures responses, as shown earlier, from ideological perspectives whether liberal or conservative.

The 1AC’s theorization of subjectivity perpetuates juridical systems of power

that define a biologically-determined cisheteronormative theorization of
gender.
Butler 90
Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the
Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in
Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. “Gender Trouble” Routledge 2011
For the most part, feminist
theory has assumed that there is some existing identity, understood through the category of
women, who not only initiates feminist interests and goals within discourse, but constitutes the
subject for whom political representation is pursued. But politics and representation are controversial terms. On the
one hand, representation serves as the operative term within a political process that seeks to extend visibility and
legitimacy to women as political subjects; on the other hand, representation is the normative function of a
language which is said either to reveal or to distort what is assumed to be true about the category
of women. For feminist theory, the development of a language that fully or adequately represents women has seemed necessary to
foster the political visibility of women. This has seemed obviously important considering the pervasive cultural condition in which
women’s lives were either misrepresented or not represented at all. Recently, this prevailing conception of the relation between
feminist theory and politics has come under challenge from within feminist discourse. The very
subject of women is no
longer understood in stable or abiding terms. There is a great deal of material that not only questions
the viability of “the subject” as the ultimate candidate for representation or, indeed, liberation, but
there is very little agreement after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute, the
category of women. The domains of political and linguistic “representation” set out in advance the
criterion by which subjects themselves are formed, with the result that representation is extended
only to what can be acknowledged as a subject. In other words, the qualifications for being a subject
must first be met before representation can be extended. Foucault points out that juridical systems
of power produce the subjects they subsequently come to represent. 1 Juridical notions of power appear
to regulate political life in purely negative terms—that is, through the limitation, prohibition, regulation,
control, and even “protection” of individuals related to that political structure through the contingent and retractable
operation of choice. But the subjects regulated by such structures are, by virtue of being subjected to
them, formed, defined, and reproduced in accordance with the requirements of those structures. If
this analysis is right, then the juridical formation of language and politics that represents women as “the
subject” of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of
representational politics. And the feminist subject turns out to be discursively constituted by the
very political system that is supposed to facilitate its emancipation. This becomes politically
problematic if that system can be shown to produce gendered subjects along a differential
axis of domination or to produce subjects who are presumed to be masculine. In such cases, an
uncritical appeal to such a system for the emancipation of “women” will be clearly self-defeating.

Comprehensive sex ed is an assimilatory tactic of homonationalism – the

progressive narrative of inclusion envelops deviant subjects into a project of
citizenship which consolidates cis-heteropatriarchy
Shannon 16 (Barrie Shannon, PhD Candidate at the School of Humanities and Social Science,
University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia. “Comprehensive for who? Neoliberal directives in
Australian ‘comprehensive’ sexuality education and the erasure of GLBTIQ identity,” Sex
Education, 2016)[discourse modified]*
Sameness, ‘homonormativity’ and GLBTIQ erasure Harris and Farrington (2014) and Riggs and Due (2013) critique the discourses of
‘sameness and homogeneity’ which permeate contemporary sexuality education, particularly in relation to the way in which GLBTIQ
people are portrayed as the same as heterosexual people. This samenessis provided as a justification for queer
people to deserve legitimacy, respect and representation within the curriculum. The underlying
assumption is ‘that they [GLBTIQ people] want nothing more than to assimilate to the standards
and limitations dictated by heterosexual hegemony’ (Peterson 2013, 489). This practice of assimilation,
which avoids critique, is somewhat of a litmus test for those who can be deemed eligible for
social citizenship. Halberstam (2003) has observed a similar trend in queer activism and representation more broadly. The
dominant narrative of the ‘gay and lesbian community is used as a rallying cry for fairly
conservative social projects aimed at assimilating gays and lesbians into the mainstream life of
the nation and the family’ (Halberstam 2003, 314). Halberstam (2003) critiques the placement of
GLBTIQ people into the dominant heteronormative temporality consisting of birth, marriage,
reproduction and death, dominantly portrayed as the ‘natural’ or universally desirable human
lifespan. Riggs and Due (2013) demonstrate this point in their exploration of how the topic of same-sex families is broached in
Australian classroom discussions. Although Australian sexuality education curricula are often well-meaning in their attempts to
include same-sex families, they appear ‘typically through a guise of liberal equality that enshrines
heterosexuality as the norm against which non-heterosexual people are measured’ (Riggs and Due 2013,
102). Though it is important that sexuality education curricula emphasise the notion that queer
families should be viewed as ‘normal’, and certainly treated as legal and societal equals, the
constitution of the ‘normal’ family in this context evades interrogation. A lack of critical
attention to the normative ‘family’ entrenches several assumptions about families and the
expected social and economic roles of each family member. Peterson (2013, 487) writes that the family is
seen to be the ‘primary organising feature of social, civil, cultural, and economic life’. The
portrayal of the family, however, is ‘predicated on persistent and unidentified, heteronormative
assumptions and conscriptions’ (Peterson 2013, 487), such as dominant modes of economic
participation, cultural reproduction, and childbirth and child-rearing (Peterson 2011). The family
itself is often presented as intertwined with seemingly ‘natural’ biological processes. Focuses on
‘reproductive biology tend to reinforce a normatively gendered and naturalised understanding
of parenthood, gender, and familial responsibilities … [which] link these social understandings to
biology’ (McNeill 2013, 836). Existing on the periphery of this normative and ‘natural’ model,
GLBTIQ families are implicitly burdened with the ‘need to somehow prove their ‘sameness’ with
heterosexuals in order to gain social credibility and legitimacy’ (Peterson 2013, 489). Wilton (1996) notes that
the ‘sameness’ test is often enforced on GLBTIQ people in same-sex relationships and their
families, in the form of gendered assumptions or questions about their roles in their own
relationships and in public life. Examples provided by Wilton (1996) often relate to confusion about who fulfils gendered
expectations as arbitrary as the completion of domestic duties, or each partner’s ‘role’ during sexual intercourse. Peterson (2013, 488)
thus warns that ‘individuals and relationships that exist outside the family’s designated bounds are at
risk of being deemed undesirable, unworthy of support, and even pathological’. The ability to
prove this sameness, or at least appear to be doing so, is a privilege that cisgendered queer
people enjoy that gender non-conforming or transgender people do not. Virtually all
representations of the nuclear family include a complementarity of typical male and female
gender roles, from which children are offered a ‘balance’ of normative gender expression.
Consequently for transgendered [transgender]* people who display visual and social transgressions of
traditional gender roles, it may not be possible to be reconciled into the traditional family model
at all. Transgendered [transgender]* and gender non-conforming people and their families therefore
face continued exclusion and discrimination within and outside of the GLBTIQ rights movement
(Jauk 2013). Elliott (2014) alleges that liberationist activisms and the queering of structural institutions
are actively discouraged through the employment of neoliberal discourses. The tenets of ‘good’
neoliberal citizenship are the ability ‘to be self-managing, self-responsible, and desiring of self-
advancement – and to conform to, rather than challenge, existing institutional arrangements’
(Elliott 2014, 212). Sexuality and its consequences are expected to be personally managed and kept
private, therefore preventing any meaningful open dialogue about the social aspects of sex,
sexuality and gender expression. Sexual autonomy in decision-making and interpersonal relationships is encouraged in
neoliberal sexuality education. McAvoy (2013, 495) agrees in this sense that ‘sex education that prioritises the value of autonomy
reifies inequality’. Elliott (2014, 222) eloquently rebukes the notion of sexual autonomy by stating that
‘we are not invulnerable, autonomous agents… we are intimately linked with others, a fact that
should be acknowledged and unpacked in the sex education classroom as well as in public policy and
government discourse’. If we accept Elliott’s (2014) argument that we are ‘intimately linked with others’, it follows that we should
look to shape a curriculum that acknowledges and celebrates the actual lived experiences of young people; sexuality in the classroom
must emphasise personhood and mutuality if it is to be relevant and effective. This is especially important for young GLBTIQ people
whose identities are subject to erasure under a heterosexualised and gendered curriculum, and whose capability to feel ‘intimately
linked’ with the world around them is diminished.

This reproductive homonationalism consolidates empire in the name of the

Child—the aff’s project of sexual citizenship mantains and justifies imperial
wars that secure the future through the extermination of deviant communities
of color
Schotten 2015 [C. Heike, Associate Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty in
Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston "Homonationalist
Futurism:“Terrorism” and (Other) Queer Resistance to Empire." New Political Science 37.1
(2015): 71-90.]
In queer theory, No Future has largely been read as making an argument regarding the constitutive heteronormativity of the social
order. Edelman names this heteronormativity “reproductive futurism” and argues that it inevitably dooms homosexuals—branded as
non-reproductive sexual nihilists—to instantiating society’s death drive. I contend, however, that No Future can be understood more
generically as a work of political theory, especially given that Edelman explicitly describes its subject matter—reproductive
futurism—as “the logic within which the political itself must be thought.”14 Identifying this political theory, however, requires some
appropriation, given that, ultimately, Edelman is more concerned with Lacan than politics. Reading with and into the text, then, I
propose three modifications of the psychoanalytic politics Edelman advances in No Future in order to more fully appropriate it for
political theorizing.15 The first is to insert a distinction between the “futurism” and “reproductive futurism” he discusses, the latter
being understood as a specific version of the former. Put simply, futurismis synopsized by the “presupposition that
the body politic must survive,”16 the putatively apolitical article of faith in the necessary continuity of
politics as such. “[E]very political vision,” Edelman claims, is “a vision of futurity.”17 More specifically, reproductive futurism
is characterized by “a set of values widely thought of as extrapolitical: values that center on the family, to be sure, but that focus on
the protection of children.”18 The iconographic signifier of reproductive futurism is the child; its mantra, “Whitney Houston’s
rendition of the secular hymn, ‘I believe that children are our future,’ a hymn we might as well simply declare our national anthem and
be done with it.”19 Reproductive futurism is the apolitical imperative that the present be held in service to the children’s future
adulthood: [W]e are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of a future than we are able to conceive of a future
without the figure of the Child. That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share
in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed. For
the social order exists
to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly
valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls
due.20 Whether discussing the survival of the body politic (futurism) or the future as symbolized by the child (reproductive futurism),
Edelman is clear that the presuppositions of both are deemed apolitical, although that is precisely what makes them “so oppressively
political.”21 For the presuppositions of (reproductive) futurism are the very terms of politics as such. To participate in politics at all,
even in protest or dissent, requires that one “submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed, of the political field—as defined
by the terms of ...reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such.”22 This is how and why
Edelman says that there is no future for queers: politics itself designates “queers” as futureless. By
definition, politics seeks
to install an order of sameness through the ideological (re)production of a future that promises a
seamless plenitude of meaning. Rather than acknowledge the impossibility of such an achievement, however, this failing
is instead foisted onto a person, people, or set of forces that instantiate that impossibility in their very existence. These
unforgivable obstacles to futurism’s achievement are “queers”: “the queer dispossesses the social order of the
ground on which it rests: a faith in the consistent reality of the social ... a faith that politics,
whether of the left or of the right, implicitly affirms.”23 Defined as non-reproductive sexual nihilists, the
positioning of queers as culture’s self-indulgent, sex-obsessed death drive thus functions to secure
the health, happiness, and adult normality of heterosexually reproducing humanity. While this
persuasive reading of heteronormativity and homophobia has generated the most critical enthusiasm for No Future, I want to argue
that reproductive futurism is neither exhaustive of the political nor futurism’s exclusive form. However hegemonic, reproductive
futurism is only “one of the forms” this “calamity” might take.24 For clearly one can invest in the future as signified by any number of
possible oppressive and unattainable ideals: not only the child, but also, for example, Christ, security (for example Hobbes), or the
American way. As Edelman himself observes, “The Child, in the historical epoch of our current
epistemological regime, is the figure for this compulsory investment in the misrecognition of
figure.”25 Futurism itself, however, he calls “the substrate of politics.”26 My second proposed modification follows from the first,
its mandate being to situate Edelman’s political theory more distinctly within history.27 In this regard, suspicious reader John
Brenkman helpfully provides the political theory references missing from No Future, noting that “modern critical social discourse,
whether among the Enlightenment’s philosophes, French revolutionaries, Marxists, social democrats, or contemporary socialists and
democrats” all engage in the kind of future-wagering Edelman describes as definitively political.28 Historically, Brenkman is
correct—futurismis a distinctively modern phenomenon that must be tethered to, among other
things, the advent of industrial capitalism, colonialism, and the rise of the nation-state. This second
modification makes clear that, in naming futurism, Edelman has identified a fundamental baseline of modernity and the workings of
modern politics. However, Brenkman’s concern is less with history than the fact that Edelman seems to foreclose the possibility of
such critical discourse by consigning it to the same status as the discourse of the Catholic Church and the religious Right. While
Brenkman’s point is well-taken, it is already Edelman’s. For, whether liberal or conservative, Left or Right, communist or fascist,
every modern political theory is invested in the repetition and reproduction of the social order, cast as a future aspirational ideal, to
which the present is held hostage. This is as true of conservative movements as of radical or revolutionary ones—modern politics as
such is defined by its investment in reproducing an order of sameness at the expense of the difference of now.29 Tavia Nyong’o has
argued that Edelman’s reading of homophobia operates as a kind of nostalgia for a political moment already past, a moment when
homosexuality really did pose an ominous and spectral threat to the social order, but does so no longer.30 However—and this is the
third modification I wish to assert—the “queer” of No Future is by no means a crudely identitarian homosexual subject, nor is the
child solely emblematic of procreation and childrearing. Edelman would agree with at least part of this point. He insists there is
“nothing intrinsic to the constitution of those identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, or queer” that
“predisposes them to resist the appeal of futurity, to refuse the temptation to reproduce, or to place themselves outside or against the
acculturating logic of the Symbolic.”31 And indeed, it is not difficult to find examples of gay reproductive futurism, the most obvious
being the movement for “marriage equality.” As former Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Joe Solmonese puts it: “The fight
for marriage equality for samesex couples is quite possibly the most conventional, family-friendly equal rights struggle ever.” He
continues, “History bends not only toward fairness and equality, but also toward common sense. Marriage strengthens couples and
families, who in turn help strengthen their communities, one at a time—leading ultimately to a stronger, more robust nation.”32
Mixing nationalism into a gay progress narrative of ever-expanding equality and familial inclusion, Solmonese here writes the
playbook for reproductive futurism’s political palatability. Tellingly, Andrew Sullivan’s earlier praise of gay marriage is even more
explicit on this count, invoking the importance of the future’s promise not just in the name of the children, but more specifically for
gay children, who must be saved from having otherwise been born into futurelessness: More important, perhaps ... its [marriage’s]
influence would be felt quietly but deeply among gay children. For them, at last, there would be some kind of future; some older faces
to apply to their unfolding lives, some language in which their identity could be properly discussed, some rubric by which it could be
explained— not in terms of sex, or sexual practices, or bars, or subterranean activity, but in terms of their future life stories, their
potential loves, their eventual chance at some kind of constructive happiness. They would be able to feel by the intimation of a myriad
examples that in this respect their emotional orientation was not merely about pleasure, or sin, or shame, or otherness (although it
might always be involved in many of those things), but about the ability to love and be loved as complete, imperfect human beings.
Until gay marriage is legalized, this fundamental element of personal dignity will be denied a whole segment of humanity. No other
change can achieve it.33 As we can see, even when the Child is gay, its salvific promise is neither diverted nor diluted. It simply
straightens out the queer threat potentially posed by bent children.34 Dangling the lure of “constructive happiness” before the eyes of
youths for whom not sugarplums but sex parties dance in their heads, Sullivan here offers up the gay version of reproductive futurism,
paternalistically reassuring us that a life of sex for sex’s sake is the meaningless, self-indulgent, anti-civilizational existence every
good moralizer ever told us it was. Taken together, Sullivan and Solmonese helpfully illustrate the fact that Edelman’s argument is, in
the end, not really about identity and not even about gay people (or, for that matter, straight people). Futurism
is a logic that
transcends the specifics of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and “queer” in Edelman’s
vocabulary does not necessarily—or, perhaps, even primarily, anymore, as Nyong’o suggests—stand in for gay
and lesbian people. But, to return to my third modification, this also means that the child is not irrevocably tied to the
existence, reproduction, or raising of “historical children.”35 In other words, even as the non- or anti-identity politics of Edelman’s
figure of queerness is increasingly evident, he neglects to establish the similarly and necessarily nonidentitarian iconography of the
future he inscribes (which also returns us to my first proposed modification, the distinction between futurism and reproductive
futurism). The queer as homosexual and the Child as historical child may be concrete, daily exemplars of (certain ubiquitous if not
exclusive versions of) heteronormativity. However, understood as a specific form of a more generalized futurist
logic, it becomes clear that the child cannot simply be equated with reproduction, child-bearing,
and child-rearing, just as the “queer” cannot simply mean “homosexual” in Edelman’s temporal
sense. The child, along with the queer, is a crucial space for political and historical concretization of Edelman’s radical but
otherwise unduly narrow political project. Puar: Terrorism, Homonationalism, and US Sexual Exceptionalism The HRC’s
language of nationhood and the non-exclusivity of the child as futurist icon are the places to begin
pushing Edelman’s queer theory toward an explicit engagement with the politics of race, nation,
and US empire. For Solmonese’s statement is not simply the rhetoric of reproductive futurism. It is also the language of
homonationalism, a term Jasbir Puar has coined to document the “transition under way in how queer subjects are
relating to nation-states, particularly the United States, from being figures of death (in other words, the AIDS
epidemic) to becoming tied to ideas of life and productivity (in other words, gay marriage and families).”36
Homonationalism is an abbreviated combination of the words “homonormative” and “nationalism,” the former term borrowed from
Lisa Duggan, who describes “the new homonormativity” as a political realignment of the late 1990s/early 2000s in which gay rights
became compatible with certain neoliberal, anti-statist, conservative, American nationalist viewpoints.37 Combining homonormativity
with nationalism, then, Puar augments Nyong’o’s critique, arguing that the
assimilation of certain gay and lesbian
subjects into the mainstream of American normalcy, respectability, and citizenship has entailed the
“fleeting sanctioning of a national homosexual subject”38 who is “complicit with heterosexual
nationalist formations rather than inherently or automatically excluded from or opposed to them.”39 One
effect of homonationalism in the post-9/11 context of the “War on Terror” is the perverse sexualization or
“queering” of Arabs and Muslims (and all those held to be such) in the figure of the “terrorist,” a figure of
monstrosity, excess, savagery, and perversion. To be clear, Puar is not suggesting that the “terrorist” is the new queer. Rather, she
is arguing that “queerness is always already installed in the project of naming the terrorist; the terrorist does not appear as such
without the concurrent entrance of perversion, deviance.”40 Neither an identity nor a defining behavioral activity (for example,
homosexuality), Puar elaborates queerness as a biopolitical tactic that functions to define and divide
populations through processes of racialization, a “management of queer life at the expense of
sexually and racially perverse death in relation to the contemporary politics of securitization,
Orientalism, terrorism, torture, and the articulation of Muslim, Arab, Sikh, and South Asian
sexualities.”41 In this view, “the contemporary U.S. heteronormative nation actually relies on and benefits from the proliferation
of queerness.”42 Homonationalism, as a biopolitics of queerness, functions to discipline and
(re)produce homosexuality as white, American, patriotic, and upwardly mobile while designating
people of color, immigrants, and Arabs and Muslims as both heterosexual and yet dangerously
“queer”—as “terrorists” or “failed and perverse” bodies that “always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction, and
are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body—homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness, and disease.”43
“Race,
As is evident, queerness in Puar’s account veers from any simple conflation with gay and lesbian subjectivity; as she says,
ethnicity, nation, gender, class, and sexuality disaggregate gay, homosexual, and queer national
subjects who align themselves with U.S. imperial interests from forms of illegitimate queerness
that name and ultimately propel populations into extinction.”44 The happily married couples that populate the HRC’s
literature and website, then, would be the homonational, or properly queer; the “monster terrorist fag” abjected into existence through
torture at Abu Ghraib or Guanta´namo, detained indefinitely in any of the US’s many illegal prisons, surveilled incessantly in mosques
and cafes, and stigmatized as suffering from arrested development by the psychologizing literature of security studies, would be the
improperly queer.45 Puar’s
point is that these queernesses go together and require one another, much
as, I think, Edelman can be seen to be arguing that the child and the queer go together and require
one another. What Puar concretizes, however, in theorizing queerness as a “process of racialization”46 is not simply the analytic
point that “queer” and “homosexual” are distinct but, more importantly, the urgently political point that the abjected or improper queer
who stands outside the social order and is in effect antagonistic to it is, in this contemporary moment, much more likely to be a
Muslim or someone perceived as “looking like” a Muslim to the American gaze than, let us admit it, the newly engaged same-sex
couples thronging state houses in Minnesota, Connecticut, and Colorado (much less the “homosexual” figure of queerness in No
Future). Understanding queerness as a process of nationalization and racialization also
concretizes and expands the understanding of heteronormativity or, in Edelman’s words, the future.
For the terrorist in Puar’s analysis resists or denies a future that is symbolized and defined not only or
simply by the child, but also by the American nation and secular Christianity. As she says, “In the
political imagination, the terrorist serves as the monstrous excess of the nation-state.”47 Post-9/11, Puar notes that this terrorist threat
is undeniably linked with Islam, which often serves as its “explanation.”48 As she observes, Islam signifies, to the ostensibly secular
and modern US, both “excess” and “savagery”: “Religious belief is thus cast, in relation to other factors fueling terrorism, as the
overflow, the final excess that impels monstrosity—the ‘different attitude toward violence’ signaling these uncivilizable forces.”49
Puar’s reading suggests that Islam threatens the futurist temporality of American empire. Cast as
retrograde, backward, and frozen in pre-modern religiosity, Islam threatens the progress narrative
of US imperial wars which are alleged to bring ever-greater freedom, not only to women and
homosexuals, but also to uncivilized, savage, and undemocratic people(s) and nations around the world.50
Finally, then, it is important to note that as Islam has been queered or come to signify queerness, it does so in two ways: first, through
the phobic association of Islam with terrorism; and, second, through the racist and Orientalist conflation of Islam with homophobia,
anti-feminism, and sexual backwardness more generally. Putting Puar’s analysis in an Edelman-esque frame, we might say that the
figure of the “terrorist” who threatens national goals, progress, hope—indeed, the nation’s very existence—can be cast as the
excessive, anti-social, future-denying figure of the “queer” in Edelman. Or, we might say that just as the domain of normativity has
expanded to include some gay people, correspondingly, the domain of (inassimilable) queerness also has shifted. Puar’s analysis of the
collusion “between homosexuality and U.S. nationalism”51 as producing two figures, the homonormative patriot and the queer
terrorist, notes them as, on the one hand, the embodiment and normative achievement of the social order and, on the other hand, the
dissolution and destruction of that social order.52 No longer designating “the homosexual” per se, “queer” names the monstrously
raced and perversely sexualized Arab/Muslim/terrorist Other that threatens the American social and political order, an order that
(some) properly gay and lesbian subjects can now, through their incorporation into normative American national life, inhabit and
reproduce. In sum, we have a theorization of “queer” wherein the sexually backward Muslim is led by the irrationality and violence of
her/his religion to annihilate those who serve and protect freedom for all. In this analysis of “the sexually exceptional homonational
and its evil counterpart, the queer terrorist of elsewhere,”53 the “terrorist” is to the HRC what, in Edelman’s analysis, the queer is to
the child.54 Edelman and Puar: Theorizing Resistance Puar’s theorization of homonationalism is a significant contribution to
queer theory and an essential corrective to Edelman’s otherwise historically and racially unmarked analysis of
(reproductive) futurism. Her work allows us to critique futurism in ways that are responsive to the specificities of its racial
and national workings, consequences gapingly unattended to by him. While Edelman deftly parses the logic of power in terms of
futurism’s hegemony, he fails fully to unpack its coercive force by focusing solely on futurism’s relationship to an exceedingly narrow
version of non-reproductive homosexuality. Although he claims that the theory of politics he explicates in No Future is indifferent to
race, arguing that “the fascism of the baby’s face ... subjects us to its sovereign authority as the figure of politics itself ... whatever the
face a particular politics gives that baby to wear— Aryan or multicultural, that of the thirty-thousand-year Reich or of an ever
expanding horizon of democratic inclusivity,”55 what is clear is that the reproductive futurism he critiques is symptomatic of a very
specific bourgeois class culture within the imperial US, a culture that garners his criticism only insofar as it is bound up with
heteronormativity.56 By contrast, Puar’s demand that we focus our attention on the racial and nationalized logics of queerness(es) and
the unexpected complicities between queers, nationalism, and empire remains only suggestive of futurism’s determinative role, never
naming it specifically. Now, this is likely because Puar neither endorses nor conceptualizes futurism as a useful diagnosis of modern
politics, just as Edelman may very much wish to privilege (white male homo) sexuality in his psychoanalysis of futurism. However, I
suggest that authorial intentions—both Puar’s and Edelman’s—be respectfully disregarded, not only because we have become savvy
to the multiple begged questions inherent in any invocation of authorial intention, but also because more than our scholarly work is at
stake when it comes to forging critical resistance to US imperial power. Indeed, while the net effect of Edelman’s analysis is that only
white gay men are considered the deathly threat portended by queerness in No Future, 57 if we return to his definition of “queer” and
insist on distinguishing between futurism and reproductive futurism, we note that “queer”
designates anyone who fails
to abide by the rules of social temporality—that is, anyone who sacrifices the future for the sake of
the present. As such, futurism’s ruthless machinations stigmatize all sorts of populations as
emblematic of the death and destruction of the social order. This broad array of misfits and perverts may
include some gay, lesbian, and queer people. It necessarily also includes the “terrorist” and “Muslim” whom Puar argues are
biopolitical targets of abjected queerness. This analysis also suggests that temporality
is a crucial axis of
determination regarding all “enemies” of the social order, a notion that links Edelman’s political theory to other
important work in radical queer politics. For example, in her definitive essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical
Potential of Queer Politics?,” Cathy Cohen argues for a re-thinking of marginal positionality in terms of one’s relation to power rather
than in terms of a binary categorization of queer vs straight. She cites the examples of the prohibition of slave marriages and the long
history of obsession with black women’s reproductive choices in the US as examples of ostensibly heterosexual people inhabiting
positions outside the bounds of normative sexuality because of race, class, and property status. In arguing for a more capacious,
intersectional queer politics that is accountable not simply to the question of who is and is not heterosexual but, more broadly, to the
question of what each of our relationships with and proximity to power may be, Cohen writes: As we stand on the verge of watching
those in power dismantle the welfare system through a process of demonizing the poor and young—primarily poor and young women
of color, many of whom have existed for their entire lives outside the white, middle-class heterosexual norm—we have to ask if these
women do not fit into society’s categories of marginal, deviant, and “queer.” As we watch the explosion of prison construction and the
disproportionate incarceration rates of young men and women of color, often as part of the economic development of poor white rural
Cohen’s
communities, we have to ask if these individuals do not fit society’s definition of “queer” and expendable.
understanding of “queer” as a kind of non- or anti-normativity based on one’s proximity to power
might also be understood in terms of futurism and its flouting by “deviants.” For, if the key
characteristic of queerness is a temporal one, then having “too many” babies is just as much a
threat to America’s future as not having any at all—it just depends on which queers we are talking
about (not only Reagan’s welfare queen, but also recall the manufactured election-year discourse about “anchor babies”).59 Naming
these explicitly makes futurism a useful tool to diagnose the contemporary political moment from a radical queer perspective that does
not fetishize sexuality as either the primary domain of subordination or the sole focus of political struggle and resistance.

The alternative is to embrace a framework for failure—an embracement of

negative emotions which is key to rejecting status quo oppression and creating
revolutionary pedagogies
Gross and Alexander 16 (Daniel M. Gross is Professor, English School of Humanities, Jonathan
Alexander is Chancellor's Professor of English, Education, and Gender & Sexuality Studies School of
Humanities | “Frameworks for Failure” | Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language,
Composition, and Culture Volume 16, Number 2. p.287-92 //cl)

Precisely along these lines, recent work in queer studies has reexamined and revalued the work of negative affect and emotions
typically associated with failure. At the same time, queer affect studies offers a useful model for how happiness
per se
creates behavioral norms, beliefs, and actions. Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010)
shows how “feelings are attributed to objects, such that some things and not others become
happiness and unhappiness causes” (14), which helps explain how the experience of happiness is
not just a personal disposition but is, rather, the product of distinct social circumstances where
certain sorts of activities are valued while others are not. As Ahmed puts it, “We are directed by
the promise of happiness, as the promise that happiness is what follows if we do this or that”
(14). Moreover, relational values are not neutral or equitable but, rather, normalizing. “Attributions of happiness,” Ahmed concludes,
“might be how social norms and ideals become affective, as if relative proximity to those norms and ideals creates happiness” (11).
So, when in the introduction to the Framework we read about how students taught the habits of mind will be “well positioned” to meet
the challenges of academic and career writing, we can consider, with Ahmed, what affective work the habits play with respect to these
particular action objects (i.e., academic and career writing). Being
“well- positioned” toward these action objects
would in this interpretation feel better, whereas being positioned poorly toward academic and
career writing would feel worse. No kidding. The problem lies in naturalizing and normalizing
this affective relation where Ahmed’s “happiness causes” do their work structurally to
reinforce the status quo and individuals respond by way of calibrating their own feelings — tutored, in this case, by the
Framework. In this way the Framework (inadvertently) back- propagates a feeling structure where students and teachers are ultimately
held responsible.8 Obscured
is a feeling structure like dissatisfaction or anger that might help us
understand how current norms of success position some people poorly despite, or sometimes
indeed because of, their own efforts or that of their teachers. How in the United States can we understand in
political and hegemonic terms the broad strokes of positive psychology? Ehrenreich’s critique is helpful up to a point, but her “hard-
nosed empiricism” and her endorsement of enlightenment values over superstition (2009: 197) ultimately disappoint as they fold into
neoliberal measures of just the sort she initially critiques. Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) does a better job showing
Pedagogy Published by Duke University Press 288 Pedagogy how, in fact, it is precisely the measures of neoliberalism that produced
our current crisis where everything is oriented toward success while everyone feels like he or she is failing at everything, all the time.
A relation of cruel optimism exists, according to Berlant, when “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. It
might involve food, or a kind of love; it might be a fantasy of the good life, or a political project. It might rest on something simpler,
too, like a new habit that promises to induce in you an improved way of being” (1). And
wouldn’t a perfect example of
the relation Berlant calls cruel optimism exist in our newly urgent habits of mind that promise to
induce in our students an improved way of being, namely, a more successful orientation toward
college and career success (at the same time that they obfuscate how we all might be usefully
disoriented toward these particular lifestyle norms)? Berlant focuses in particular on the end of the postwar good-
life fantasy and the rise of neoliberalism in the United States and Europe — a scene that would implicate us and our students, as well
as the organizational structures at every level that give our school lives meaning, which includes (or so goes the argument) fantasies of
successful personhood that become decreasingly accessible — hence the queer theorists’ (and our) injunction to take negative
theorists point out how unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and even failure might
emotions seriously. Queer
serve as entry points to critique the power structures and normalizing discourses that direct
our lives and efforts along certain lines. In The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Judith Halberstam
argues that “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in
fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2 –
3). As a critique, failure is “a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and
discipline.” And as a practice, failure “recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the
dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can exploit the
unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities” (88). Next to a “framework for
success” we offer a “framework for failure” that can help us better understand how failure
and negative emotions are an ineradicable and sometimes crucial component of our
educational lives. We have plenty of company in this effort. Developing a Deweyan – Freirean model of critical pedagogy, for
instance, Shor calls for “a holistic, historically situated, politically aware intervention in society to solve a felt need or problem, to get
something done in a context of reflective action” (1996: 162). Such reflective “intervention,” based on a “felt need or problem,” is
embodied in the experience of systematic failure, in an affective register of our insufficient Pedagogy Published by Duke University
Press Gross and Alexander Frameworks for Failure 289 and sometimes botched practice of democracy. Likewise, queer theorists
remind us that we can turn such failure, our disappointment and frustration, into critique, into the kind of “politically aware
intervention” that is not just a logical operation or career preparation. Fewer than Seven Habits of Relatively Unsuccessful People Our
critique of the Framework is sometimes strident, but it is so only because we feel something important is elided as we rush toward
student success — namely, a more robust consideration of negative emotions vis- à- vis writing pedagogy and the structures that
support it. Certainly composition studies have dealt with negative emotions in the past. Pre- 1970s pedagogies of error correction,
shame, and punishment were rightly and soundly critiqued by the likes of Joseph Williams, Mina Shaughnessy, and Peter Elbow, who
helped us turn the tide toward positive pedagogies and positive emotions sympathetic with a larger culture where affirmation was
newly important. In “More Than a Feeling: Disappointment and WPA Work,” Micciche (2002: 432) “address[es] the climate of
disappointment that characterizes English studies generally and composition studies — particularly writing program administration
(WPA) — specifically.” For Micciche, such disappointment should not remain a “characteristic,” something that WPAs “have,” but,
rather, should become the grounds through which WPAs and composition programs reimagine themselves and the work they do with
students on college campuses. This is not new news in composition studies. As noted earlier, others such as Worsham (1998) and
Miller (1991) have explored not only the affective dimension of our work but also the possibility of emotions as critical practice.
Along these lines, we might consider again Elbow’s free- writing narrative. He felt “wounded and
tired,” a “total failure,” “lonely, hurting, and panicked.” These feelings are the grounds upon
which Elbow set out to revolutionize his own — and eventually the field’s — approach to the
teaching of writing. And yet, most free writing today seems taught as a pleasant and liberating
activity, in which students are invited to enjoy the delights of a creative process. In its inception,
however, free writing was not just a personal strategy to generate text, a solution to an
individual’s problem; it was an implicit critique of a system of education that induced shame. It
was, in the spirit of the times, a revolutionary way to reimagine how an education in writing might be dramatically different. Now,
free writing is just another practice of invention among many others, and the original affective energies — fear, frustration, even anger
— give way to “invention strategies” and the vague gesture toward best practices that should come along with some sense of sat
Pedagogy Published by Duke University Press 290 Pedagogy isfaction. We should note by way of this example that any particular
emotion is not inherently and always a good or a bad thing. As Elbow wrote, it was imperative to overcome shame, for instance. But
overcoming is not the same as outright denial, and it should not be confused with the active suppression of bad feeling or with the
pseudoscientific treatment of negative emotion as maladaptation. And just as we have argued that happiness is not always a positive,
we do not endorse negative emotions tout court. Emotions are not the same always and everywhere; emotions are historical, social,
and strategic phenomena that must be treated as such. Hence, the new emotion studies cited in this article work outward from a
particular challenge. Queer theorists know the emotionally normative dynamic well, the move to forget difficult feelings while
promoting success narratives and happiness causes. David Halperin and Valerie Traub, in a recent collection,
have called for exploration of a new analytic, “gay shame,” or the critical probing of aspects of
queer life that, in contrast to the out- loud- and- proud ethos of gay rights activism, have been left
behind or purposely elided because they do not quite fit the narratives of happy pride, self-
acceptance, and assimilation to larger cultural norms of social and sexual acceptability, such as the
pursuit of marriage equality (Halperin and Traub 2010). What Halperin and others, like Berlant and Halberstam,
know well is the critical power of negative emotion. The Stonewall riots in 1969 that made the
gay liberation movement nationally visible erupted from people who, to borrow Elbow’s words,
felt “wounded and tired,” and “lonely, hurting, and panicked.” They were also angry and
pissed off. Like Elbow reflecting on the educational establishment or the Vietnam War draft that he resisted by mobilizing
conscientious objectors, queers at the Stonewall Inn wanted not just personal change but structural change. And they turned their
affective response to transformative power. The cost of forgetting negative emotion, even the experience of
failure, is high. Success feels good, but it does not reorient us against unjust norms. Success, as it
trumps personal failure, can also numb us to failures that are structural. Imagining what a pedagogy or framework for
failure might look like is difficult. But we can begin with the Framework for Success and its
proposed habits of mind, and we can “zap” them. Gay activist Arthur Evans wrote a manifesto titled “How to Zap
Straights” (1973) in which he advocated for public displays of homoerotic affection designed “to rouse closet gays from their apathy,
direct gay anger toward oppressive straight institutions, and create a widespread feeling of gay identity” (593). Key to Evans’s tactic
was the Pedagogy Published by Duke University Press Gross and Alexander Frameworks for Failure 291 development of negative
feeling among gays, particularly a sense of injustice and even outrage, to create structural change. Following Evans’s lead, we might
“zap” the Framework’s habits of mind. For instance, we can take our
opening habit, “curiosity,” as the desire to know
we should remember
more about the world and revisit its etymology that tells us to worry more about the world; in this case,
Michel Foucault and approach the world of assessment with some pointed concern, or worry, as
we ask our students to “desire” in certain ways and to open themselves up.9 With Foucault we might wax
skeptical that such vulnerability is always in the interest of the student, and we might pay more attention to the function of power that
is the desire to know (i.e., discipline). Or we can zap responsibility, defined as “the ability to take ownership of one’s
actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others.” Fair enough. But note how this definition of
responsibility, following the best neoliberal practice, seems to place the burden of action and consequence on
the individual.
What about institutional responsibility? What about public education’s responsibility to the
students that it engages? Given our protracted economic malaise, an emphasis on career preparation positions students for
work in systems in which success will be increasingly hard to obtain. Is this a responsible pedagogy? To be fair, the Framework is an
attempt to be responsive to the needs of both our students and the institutions responsible for educating them. It tries to cut the
difference between promoting democratic habits of mind, on one hand, and an educational culture that demands quantifiable results,
on the other. Its strategy of accommodation, though, might itself be destined to fail. In her critique of the Framework, Johnson (2013:
529) argues that promoting “habits of mind” might prove untenable as a sufficient response to calls for measurable skills and
demonstration of success: “The Framework positions habits of mind as attitudes and intellectual processes, but pressures in the
national landscape may motivate writing teachers and program administrators to position habits of mind as outcome — end results
from an assignment or program that external audiences may be interested in assessing.” As Johnson summarizes, “The convergence of
habits of mind and assessment seems to offer two unsatisfying options for fostering habits of mind: (1) position them as assessable
outcomes to assure their significance, or (2) position them as unmeasurable and fundamentally antithetical to large- scale assessment”
(534). We argue that a third critique is necessary: how might the habits of mind as articulated in the Framework, whether measurable
or not, (1) direct students toward normative success while rendering failure patholog Pedagogy Published by Duke University Press
292 Pedagogy ical and (2) reinforce “happiness causes,” such as career and college success, that become naturalized by rendering in
terms of personal feeling certain vexed relations that may sometimes be addressed better by social critique and the negative emotions
Think of Elbow
that serve as markers of a different sort? As a field, as educators, as writers, we have dealt with failure before.
and his revolutionary pedagogies. However, we are now thirty- plus years down the line, and we are living in a situation
where classroom realities, administrative pressures, and lifestyle exigencies of the sort treated by Berlant and Halberstam
seek “failure frameworks” that could be helpful in the face of success frameworks that appear all
too distant. In fact, examples of discomfort and pain, even failure, characterize portions of the literacy narratives of many in our
field, including Shor’s Empowering Education, Keith Gilyard’s Voices of the Self (1991), Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps (1993),
Morris Young’s Minor Re/Visions (2004), and Vershawn A. Young’s Your Average Nigga (2007). These works extend the literacy
narrative of someone like Elbow, writing about his own alienation from academic writing and modes of thinking. They also
complement Elbow’s relatively (white) bourgeois alienation from the academy by marking the experiences of those whose race and/or
class position them even more awkwardly with respect to these norms. Villanueva writes explicitly about how a position feels, and
especially about the bad feelings that announce themselves with tiresome regularity and compel a response: “As the perennial
outsider, I am always conscious of having to detail the political, of always having to foreground and contextualize, of having to
assume that the matters that have given rise to my worldview are foreign to most of the students, maybe even all of the students”
(quoted in Gil- Gómez 2012: n.p.). Note how the feeling in this case does not come with punctuated anger or fear, against the
background of some stable equilibrium or comfort. Instead, we feel with Villanueva a kind of exhaustion; the words perennial and
always mark a cost, in mind and body, of constantly having to explain one’s presence and justify one’s contribution. Such a felt sense
of one’s work, of one’s literate practice, involves more than just learning how to deal with troubling emotions; it is an ongoing
engagement with an emotional disposition, with a condition of negative affect, that characterizes the experiences of many in an
academy and a society that position us along axes of inside and outside, belonging and exclusion. In
this case and others,
negative affect works in the name of literacy education. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the critique
existing without the attendant anxiety and fear of marginality — of being marginalized — as its
motivation.
 Case
“LGBTQ+ Friendly” education only manages negative stigma whilst maintaining
the superiority of the nuclear family.
McNeill 13 [Tanya McNeill received her PhD in Sociology with a Certificate in Feminist Studies from the University of
California at Santa Cruz in 2008. She has taught in Women’s and Gender Studies, LGBT Studies and Sociology at the University of
Wisconsin Eau Claire, Wellesley College, the University of California at Davis, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her
research interests include the production of knowledge about the family, the regulation of gender, race, sexuality, and class, childhood
and gender, and LGBT advocacy. Her essay, ‘A nation of families: The codification and (be)longings of heteropatriarchy’ was
published in Toward a Sociology of the Trace in 2010. She currently lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she is researching cultural and
political representations of gender creative (or gender non-conforming) children.
file:///C:/Users/Benny/Downloads/sex%20education%20and%20the%20promotion%20of%20heteronormativity.pdf “Sex education
and the promotion of heteronormativity” pg. 9] Calculus BC

The assertion of the superiority of a particular family form raises affective and pedagogical
problems in the classroom. According to these state policies, teachers in California12 and in
Prince William County must simultaneously teach their students that the heteropatriarchal family
is most ‘desirable’ and manage (or discipline) the negative feelings that might emerge for
students whose families look ‘different.’13 Although these statements seem to be articulating the
importance of respecting all students and all families, they produce the very ideas about ‘non-
traditional families’ that they then attempt to counter. The discussion of the superiority of
heteronormative families produces inequality and itself is a form of ‘denigration’ of children from
gay and lesbian families, single-parent families, foster families, grandparent or legal guardian
headed families, polyamorous families, or any number of other non-heteronormative family
formations. These assumptions about both normative and ‘nontraditional’ families permeate US
public policy and demonstrate the limitations of diversity discourses. Discussions of family
‘difference’ in sexuality education policy and curricula reveal a deep ambivalence towards
diversity; these texts create a hierarchy of family forms within schools, and within society at
large. Certain families are more valuable to the state than others.14 Teaching that the heteronormative family is
preferable to all other family forms generates tensions around how to manage students’ feelings
of ‘worth’ and belonging. This illustrates the affective nature of heteropatriarchy as a social structure. It is also a moment of
ambivalence in public school policy; it pits conflicting pedagogical goals against each other. How are students to be taught self-esteem
and feelings of competence and worth (all included in Virginia’s standards), when they are simultaneously taught that their families do
not fit the desired norm? These moments of ambivalence and contradiction are frequent in curricular documents dealing with sexuality
and family. In the next section I take the state of Virginia’s curricular standards as a case study of the heteronormative regulation of
the family, and of the state’s regulation of affect.

Conservative backlash means that states don’t follow through- that’s a NB to

the CP
Jonathan Zimmerman, 8-31-2014, "A global front against sex ed,"(Jonathan Zimmerman is the professor of the history of
educaton at NYU), Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sex-education-is-a-global-dividing-line-between-
liberals-and-conservatives/2014/08/31/b92715b0-2e3b-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html?utm_term=.1fbd7c153796

Two decades later, girls’ education has expanded steadily around the globe. But sex education has stalled. In most
countries, children and adolescents receive a smattering of information about their reproductive
organs and a set of stern warnings against putting them to use. Whereas the Cairo meeting envisioned preparing
youths to be autonomous sexual beings, most contemporary sex education simply admonishes them against
sex itself. And that’s not because certain parts of the world are “conservative” or “traditional” on the topic. Instead,
conservatives around the globe have united across borders to block or inhibit sex education . On issues
of sex and reproduction, it’s not East vs. West anymore. It’s liberals vs. conservatives, each of which often have more in common with
their ideological soulmates in other parts of the world than they do with people next door. This configuration was already apparent at
the Cairo meeting, where delegates from seven countries — including the host nation, Egypt — dissented from the resolution on sex
education. As an Iranian representative explained, the resolution “could be interpreted as applying to
sexual relations outside the framework of marriage, which is totally unacceptable.” The resolution
was also condemned by the Vatican, which had sent a papal envoy to Tehran earlier that year to coordinate its campaigns
against the Cairo accords. The resolution caught the attention of growing Muslim immigrant
communities in Europe, who joined hands with native white conservatives against sex education.
On most issues, including immigration itself, these groups were at loggerheads. But on sex
education, they saw eye to eye. Meanwhile, a burgeoning network of international organizations bound conservatives
together. Born a year after Cairo, the World Congress of Families united Christians, Muslims, Hindus and
Jews who opposed abortion, same-sex marriage and sex education. It received a letter of praise in
2004 from President George W. Bush, who had declared that one-third of U.S. foreign assistance for
HIV/AIDS prevention would be devoted to abstinence-only education. But the global right was not simply
a product of conservative U.S. support, as liberal critics too often assume. When U.S. delegates condemned a reference to
“reproductive health services and education” at a U.N. special session on children in 2002, the other opponents
of the language were Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Syria. On sex education, one observer wryly noted, the
United States had united with the “axis of evil” that it otherwise reviled. With the election of Barack
Obama, U.S. foreign policy became friendlier to sex education and reproductive rights. But the global
campaign against sexual information for adolescents continued. In Asia and Africa, especially, critics railed
against “Western” sex education. They simultaneously made common cause with their conservative brethren in the West, borrowing
the rhetoric of family values and — increasingly — multiculturalism. Consider the reaction to the
U.N. Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization’s 2009 “International Guidelines on Sexuality Education,” which urged schools to address often-
ignored topics — including masturbation, abortion and contraception — so that adolescents could
develop their own sexual selves. One critic in Singapore blasted the “U.S.-centrism” of the guidelines,
which were authored by two American educators. He was echoed by a right-wing opponent in the United States,
who decried the standards as a “one-size-fits-all approach” that was “damaging to cultures,
religions, and to children.” In the 20 years since Cairo, the world has globalized as never before. Hundreds of
millions of people have migrated among countries, while digital technologies forge new
connections across them. But as the fate of sex education shows, globalization does not
necessarily mean liberalization. It can also bind formerly isolated conservatives into powerful
new coalitions, which can lead to stalemates on causes that liberals hold dear.