The sociolinguistics of formal sex(uality) education: Doing ‘it’ differently

This study contributes to the panel by reviewing language-oriented research into the affordances and constraints of formal sexuality education in classrooms. Analysis will focus on a meta-analysis of published sociocultural language research, conducted in classrooms, where sex and sexuality enjoy a sustained focus. Findings demonstrate that constraints can be mitigated in such institutional settings by fostering sexual agency, framing it as the formation of sexually agentive subjects during interaction. Providing students with ample talking time around sexuality, in an academic forum, can allow for the development of a self who has the capacity to act sexually and be in control of those actions regardless of gender. These are also selves who have been given the opportunity to ‘juggle’ elements of their subjectivities that might pose problems in the process and sort out a way to reconcile those elements with sexual agency. In other words, it allows them the intellectual and social space to sort out what it means to have the capacity to act in relation to sexuality and how this capacity fits with (or forms a poor fit with) other aspects of selfhood such as sex, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, class, ethnicity, or religious belief. Relinquishing a didactic approach to sexuality education and embracing a community-based, discussion-oriented paradigm can result in reconciliation between sexual agency and the circulating discourses that complicate its realisation. Classrooms can be organized in such a way that localized community practice can be negotiated around how to have constructive discussions about sexuality.

https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/lavlang/2021/saturday/34