Sexual Pedagogies

Understandings of sexuality and sex education have changed dramatically, and in this collection, the authors explore the various texts that were used to teach, to entertain, to sanction and to form a sexual standard for a nation. According to Nelson and Martin, these include a puberty education, sermons on abstinence, medical writings promoting sexual fulfillment, Hollywood comedies about sexual coming of age and picture books validating homosexuality. The essays included here are designed to illustrate the many responses that Anglophone culture has had to such texts for over a century.

Popular film and television hold valuable potential for learning about sex and sexuality beyond the information-based model of sex education currently in schools. This book argues that the representation of complicated—or "messy"—relationships in these popular cultural forms makes them potent as affective pedagogical moments. It endeavours to develop new sexual literacies by contemplating how pedagogical moments, that is, fleeting moments which disrupt expectations or create discomfort, might enrich the available discourses of sexuality and gender, especially those available to adolescents. In Part One, Clarke critiques the heteronormative discourses of sex education that produce youth in particularly gendered ways, noting that "rationality" is often expected to govern experiences that are embodied and arguably inherently incoherent. Part Two explores public intimacy, contemplating the often overlapping and confused boundaries between public and private.

Popular film and television hold valuable potential for learning about sex and sexuality beyond the information-based model of sex education currently in schools. This book argues that the representation of complicated—or "messy"—relationships in these popular cultural forms makes them potent as affective pedagogical moments. It endeavours to develop new sexual literacies by contemplating how pedagogical moments, that is, fleeting moments which disrupt expectations or create discomfort, might enrich the available discourses of sexuality and gender, especially those available to adolescents. In Part One, Clarke critiques the heteronormative discourses of sex education that produce youth in particularly gendered ways, noting that "rationality" is often expected to govern experiences that are embodied and arguably inherently incoherent. Part Two explores public intimacy, contemplating the often overlapping and confused boundaries between public and private.

As anyone who has read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales knows, Middle English literature is rife with sexually explicit language and situations. Less canonical works can be even more brazen in describing illicit acts of sexual activity and sexual violence. Such scenes and language were not, however, included exclusively for titillation. In Obscene Pedagogies, Carissa M. Harris argues instead for obscenity’s usefulness in sexual education. She investigates the relationship between obscenity, gender, and pedagogy in Middle English and Middle Scots literary texts from 1300 to 1580 to show how sexually explicit and defiantly vulgar speech taught readers and listeners about sexual behavior and consent. Through innovative close readings of literary texts including erotic lyrics, single-woman’s songs, debate poems between men and women, Scottish insult poetry battles, and The Canterbury Tales, Harris demonstrates how through its transgressive charge and galvanizing shock value, obscenity taught audiences about gender, sex, pleasure, and power in ways both positive and harmful. She focuses in particular on understudied female-voiced lyrics and gendered debate poems, many of which have their origin in oral culture, and includes teaching-ready editions of fourteen largely unknown anonymous lyrics in women’s voices. Harris’s own voice, proudly witty and sharply polemical, inspires the reader to address these medieval texts with an eye on contemporary issues of gender, violence, and misogyny.

Pedagogies of Possibility for Negotiating Sexuality Education with Young People offers a sustained and critical consideration of the possibilities and politics of engaging with young people in the redevelopment and delivery of contemporary approaches to Sexuality Education.

Sexuality, Society and Pedagogy problematises some of the prevailing assumptions that frame this area of study. In doing so, it aims to make visible the challenges of teaching sexuality education in South African schools, while demonstrating its potential for reshaping our conceptions of the social and cultural representations thereof. Although the book is largely situated in experiences and perspectives within the South African context, it is hoped that the questions raised, reflections, analyses and arguments will contribute to thinking about sexuality education in diverse contexts, in particular more developing contexts.

M. Jacqui Alexander is one of the most important theorists of transnational feminism working today. Pedagogies of Crossing brings together essays she has written over the past decade, uniting her incisive critiques, which have had such a profound impact on feminist, queer, and critical race theories, with some of her more recent work. In this landmark interdisciplinary volume, Alexander points to a number of critical imperatives made all the more urgent by contemporary manifestations of neoimperialism and neocolonialism. Among these are the need for North American feminism and queer studies to take up transnational frameworks that foreground questions of colonialism, political economy, and racial formation; for a thorough re-conceptualization of modernity to account for the heteronormative regulatory practices of modern state formations; and for feminists to wrestle with the spiritual dimensions of experience and the meaning of sacred subjectivity. In these meditations, Alexander deftly unites large, often contradictory, historical processes across time and space. She focuses on the criminalization of queer communities in both the United States and the Caribbean in ways that prompt us to rethink how modernity invents its own traditions; she juxtaposes the political organizing and consciousness of women workers in global factories in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Canada with the pressing need for those in the academic factory to teach for social justice; she reflects on the limits and failures of liberal pluralism; and she presents original and compelling arguments that show how and why transgenerational memory is an indispensable spiritual practice within differently constituted women-of-color communities as it operates as a powerful antidote to oppression. In this multifaceted, visionary book, Alexander maps the terrain of alternative histories and offers new forms of knowledge with which to mold alternative futures.

Despite its centrality to much of contemporary personal and public discourse, sexuality remains infrequently discussed in most composition courses, and in our discipline at large. Moreover, its complicated relationship to discourse, to the very languages we use to describe and define our worlds, is woefully understudied in our discipline. Discourse about sexuality, and the discourse of sexuality, surround us—circulating in the news media, on the Web, in conversations, and in the very languages we use to articulate our interactions with others and our understanding of ourselves. It forms a core set of complex discourses through which we approach, make sense of, and construct a variety of meanings, politics, and identities. In Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy, Jonathan Alexander argues for the development of students' "sexual literacy." Such a literacy is not just concerned with developing fluency with sexuality as a "hot" topic, but with understanding the intimate interconnectedness of sexuality and literacy in Western culture. Using the work of scholars in queer theory, sexuality studies, and the New Literacy Studies, Alexander unpacks what he sees as a crucial--if often overlooked--dimension of literacy: the fundamental ways in which sexuality has become a key component of contemporary literate practice, of the stories we tell about ourselves, our communities, and our political investments. Alexander then demonstrates through a series of composition exercises and writing assignments how we might develop students' understanding of sexual literacy. Examining discourses of gender, heterosexuality, and marriage allows students (and instructors) a critical opportunity to see how the languages we use to describe ourselves and our communities are saturated with ideologies of sexuality. Understanding how sexuality is constructed and deployed as a way to "make meaning" in our culture gives us a critical tool both to understand some of the fundamental ways in which we know ourselves and to challenge some of the norms that govern our lives. In the process, we become more fluent with the stories that we tell about ourselves and discover how normative notions of sexuality enable (and constrain) narrations of identity, culture, and politics. Such develops not only our understanding of sexuality, but of literacy, as we explore how sexuality is a vital, if vexing, part of the story of who we are.