Risking Ambivalence: Sex Education and the Problem of Health

• In Event: Health and Sexuality Education: Considering Intersections of Policy, Politics, and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
How and why did sex education become a problem of health? Across diverse national, state, and local jurisdictions, sexuality education— when it is part of a formal curriculum— is cordoned off in the health class. For advocates of comprehensive sex education, this strategic alliance between sexuality and health has represented an attempt to extricate discussions of sexuality from questions of morality, religion and politics in exchange for the supposed neutrality and rationality of science.


Theoretical framework and arguments
This paper draws on debates in psychoanalysis and queer theory on the relationship between sexuality and negativity, in particular, how what is being called “the anti-relational” or “anti-social” thesis in queer theory can offer new vantages to consider conflicts in sex education. In these debates, sexuality has the capacity to both tie us to the social, make us feel part of something larger than ourselves, and become the grounds of a politics, identity, or relationship. But sexuality also has the capacity to unbind, shatter social ties, produce feelings of loss, and undo illusions of identity, politics and relationality. Both these possibilities can be a source of pleasure. This ambivalence – that sexuality is made from love and hate, often for the same object – is a feature of sex education that cannot be tolerated by an exclusive focus on “health.”
Debates in sex education are mired in these complexities. In conservative iterations of sex education, sexuality is understood as having the capacity to undo a whole host of social good: moral precepts; social convention; physical, emotional and spiritual health; claims to innocence; and even childhood itself can be ruined by sexuality. In response, comprehensive sex education has framed sex as a problem of and for ‘health’. Here, ‘health’ stands in for the adhesive and pro-social qualities of sexuality. ‘Healthy relationships’, ‘healthy body image’, ‘healthy self-esteem’: youth drown in admonitions that they should feel positive about all aspects of their bodies, selves, and identities.
In this paper, I bring this critique of “health” in sexuality education to recent controversies about a new sexual health curriculum document in Ontario, Canada. In this controversy, the inclusion of LGBTQ issues was made through an appeal to the “health” of queer youth. Such a framing, while politically palatable, risks equating LGBTQ youth with negative health outcomes, and, significantly, leans on a theory of sexuality that forgets the ambivalent qualities of desire.

Conclusions
The confidence in science and the promise of a ‘positive, healthy sexuality’ has the potential to push the ambivalent questions about sexuality to the side so that young people will appear as responsible, caring, and always sure of their decisions. This paper asks us to risk uncertainty and ambivalence so that our vision of a meaningful sex education can tolerate that not knowing or feeling confused (for both youth and adults) are not problems to be solved by sex education, but rather the basis of learning about sexuality and, in fact, the very grounds of learning itself.

Author

• Jen Gilbert, York University