Part 3: Sex Education

Kendall - The sex education debates

● Abstinence - only education
● Comprehensive sexuality education
● Implications of sex education on our society?
● 8 states limit what they are able to teach the students.
● Certain districts all around only ever teach abstinence
● Abstinence should not be the only thing you teach
● 22 states require sex education in their schools
Lamb - Just the Facts
● Hidden Values?
○ Lamb uses discourse analysis to explore the hidden values in the
“evidence-based” curricula the progressive currently favor…”
● What’s a Discourse?
○ General notion of a conversation that is constituted of knowledge and
power.
● Foucualt refers to :“Ways of consulting knowledge, together with the social
practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such
knowledge and relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of
thinking and producing meaning.They constitute the ‘nature’ of the body,
unconscious and conscious mind and emotional life of the subjects they seek to
govern”
● Science Discourse
○ Science discourse: treat sex in a disinterested and neutral manner
○ Hegemonic normalization
■ Determines what’s visible vs. invisible
○ How do they matter?
■ Emotional and social aspects would be left out of discussion and
only the science aspect would be present.
○ Examples?
● Discourse of Health and Healthy Choices
○ Health discourse assumes that individuals who are given enough
information has the capability and obligation to ensure their own health
○ Problem of this discourse?
■ Narrows the meaning of sexueal health
■ Puts entire responsibility on individual choices and overlooks social
constraints
○ Examples?
■ Students from low income families
 ● Discourse of Efficacy
○ Evidence-based programs on curriculum that is effective
■ Effective means reducing sexual activity, pregnancy, and infection
(measured by tests)
○ What does this discourse hide?
■ Focus on health behaviors rather than the motivations and reasons
behind the behavior
○ Examples?
● Discourses of Sex Education
○ How do these discourses matter?
■ How knowledges and power are combined
○ Why is it important to understand the discourses behind sex education?
■ You need to understand the different point of views in order to
effectivly teach and explain sex education.
Armstrong, Hamilton, Seeley - Good girls: gender and social class and slut
discourse
● Social constructivism
○ Notions of what’s feminine and masculine
● How are they constructed? Constructed/maintained by whom?
● How do they matter?
● Gender performativity
○ Slut discourse serves as a vehicle by which girls discipline themselves
and others. And, it doesn’t require the existence of a “real slut”
○ Femininities (and masculinities) are hierarchically organized and
differentially valued
○ Social class is a way women (and men) establish hierarchies and different
values of beauty
○ The class boundaries women draw are moral boundaries
● Who defines sexuality and femininity
○ Sexual privliage also involves the ablility to define what is acceptable
sexuality and femininity
○ The use of words like slut, whore, prude, classt, etc. are also used to
indicate sexual or moral superiority and inferiority
○ Who gets to define acceptable sexuality and femininity is deeply tied to
social class
■ Competing forces between high-status girls vs. low-status girls
● Slut and virgin mentality
○ Implications: Hold an impossible standard against people
■ Draws boundaries on both ends.
● Group discussion notes:
 ○ They have higher standards.
● A focus on the individual level does not provide a complete picture of stigma
process or the cause of slut-shaming
● Educators must help students understand how social class influences gender
and sexuality
● Sex education is much more than a fact-based education around healthy sexual
choices
● Sex education cannot be separate from moral education becuase our sexual and
gener identities are also used to define ideas of moral superiority and inferiority
Pascoe Reading:
● Masculinity and Homophobia
○ F*g discourse serves as a way boys discipline themselves and each other
through joking relationships
■ This is not only limited to the F-word. I can include, gay, bitch,
acting like a girl, etc
○ The use of the f-word is about performing masculinity
Mayo: Thinking Through Biases
-LGBTQ Youth and Education & Queer Theory-
● Disrupting the Norms
○ Assumptions of heterosexual culture at schools reinforce the social roles
of men and women
○ Compulsory heterosexuallity: normative hetersexuality relies on
hegemonic and interlocked definition of masculinity and femininity
■ Hegemonic: dominance and how the values of a certain definition
gains dominance.
○ Queer theory: deconstructs the binary notions of gender and sexuality
●