Pornographic Pedagogies: Social Media, Sexual Health, and Queer Youth of Color

• In Event: 70.031 - New Materialisms and the Ontologies of Social Context: Critical Inquiry on Equity and Justice in Education

Abstract

While all young people deserve access to comprehensive sexual health education, a daunting set of barriers has limited such access for queer youth of color in American K-12 schools. These barriers include heteronormative, pro-abstinence sexual health curricula in schools, homophobic reactions to queer-inclusive curricular efforts in communities of color, and the deafening silence on queer sex in educational scholarship on queer youth. By contrast, increased access to social media affords queer youth of color with numerous possibilities for engaging and producing sexually explicit content, and for accessing and participating in sexual networks. Drawing upon Boyd’s notion of networked publics (2011) and incorporating findings from an ethnographic study of a HIV/AIDS services center, this paper will consider social media as a dynamic context for queer-inclusive, sex-positive sexual health education for queer youth of color. To do so, this paper will first explore the tensions that emerge when educational research becomes the site of discourses on the sexual desires and practices of queer youth of color. It will then consider the potential for social media to mitigate those tensions as an alternative sexual education context for queer youth of color while also contending with the challenges that this context may pose. By weighing the affordances and risks of social media as a tool for sexual health education for queer youth of color, this paper invites educational stakeholders to wrestle with the possibilities and dangers of bringing queerness, race, and youth sexual desires to the surface in our pedagogical work.

Author

• Edward Brockenbrough, University of Rochester