Sex education

This book recounts a feminist poststructural and critical ethnographic investigation of the production of knowledge and gendered subjectivities within a single Tasmanian secondary co-educational government school. The main focus of the investigation was on how power operated through dominant pedagogical practices to constitute particular versions of sexuality as the truth, and to what effect (Foucault 1980). The investigation examined teacher and student dominant discourses of knowledge regarding sex, sexuality and sexual decision-making and the impact they had upon students’ production of gendered subjectivity. It also examined the sex education program’s potential for addressing issues of sexual violence, homophobia and sexual health. This book argues that current pedagogies within sex education classes reproduce binary versions of gender, which are inequitable and significantly limiting in terms of transforming homophobic, sexist and discriminatory attitude. This book offers an alternative model of sex education based on a critical pedagogical approach that focuses on the concept of sexual ethics and the potential for pedagogies to become catalysts for change.