Making Trouble: Worried Teaching and Learning in Sex Education

• In Event: The Affective Turn, Sexuality, and Curriculum Studies

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the worry that adults and teachers bring to and perform in learning and teaching about sexuality and, in particular, queer sexuality. Drawing on psychoanalysis and the sociology of emotions, particularly the work of Janice Irvine (2002), Adam Phillips (1994), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003), I consider worry as a pedagogical stance—an affective positioning that allows teachers to establish students as always vulnerable to sexual risk and exploitation and always in need of a rational, effective, and purposeful intervention from the all-knowing teacher. Such worried instruction rests on a normative understanding of life’s trajectories: teachers and adults must fancy themselves able to predict the outcomes of students’ and young people’s behaviors (“continue along that troubling path, and this is what’s in store for you!”). Similarly, in order to sustain a sense of predictable trajectories, knowledge must be predictable, instrumental, purposeful, and useful. Such a worried and all-knowing education holds at bay the contingency and curiosity that unsettle life and knowledge.
Over the last decade, I have considered the entanglement of emotions and knowledge in several different sites related to sexuality education. I have observed communities in the U.S. South debating responses to abstinence-only legislation and watched as teachers and students in the conventional sex education classroom completed lessons on puberty, reproduction, and disease and pregnancy prevention. I have worked in California with jailed women, public health educators, and university students in a collaborative and participatory investigation of HIV prevention and risk among incarcerated women of color. Finally, I have facilitated focus groups of adults in the U.S. Midwest who debated sex education’s potential to reach beyond conventional prevention messages to an expansive understanding of sexuality education.
While the sites and focus of these studies of sexuality and education in the United States have been richly varied, they have shared an important affective tone—that of worry. Worried teachers have designed lessons that would keep vigilant and critical parents at bay while still addressing their students’ pressing need for information to help them stay healthy. Public health educators and university researchers worried that jailed women would not get the education and support they needed to negotiate safer sex with their primary partners, secure legitimate employment, and avoid further court involvement. And debating adults worried that teachers were an ultimately corrupting force, children were growing up too quickly, and the world was an increasingly dangerous place. But worry does more than anticipate a future; it also creates a present. Worry positions teachers and adults as knowing and necessary and posits students, children, and youth as deficient, vulnerable, and dependent upon the beneficent adult teacher. How, then, can sexuality curriculum imagine futures without also cementing the present and refusing to allow for the contingency and curiosity necessary to a queer present and future?

Author

• Jessica Fields, San Francisco State University