Publication Cover
Sex Education
Sexuality, Society and Learning
Volume 18, 2018 - Issue 1
10,021
Views
11
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Articles

Probing the politics of comprehensive sexuality education: ‘Universality’ versus ‘Cultural Sensitivity’: a Dutch–Bangladeshi collaboration on adolescent sexuality education

ORCID Icon
Pages 107-121 | Received 16 Jun 2017, Accepted 08 Nov 2017, Published online: 05 Jan 2018
 

Abstract

As part of Western European development aid policy, comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) is increasingly promoted in resource-poor countries. This paper engages with CSE promotion in Bangladesh funded by the Dutch Government. It unpacks the ‘collaboration’ by looking at how a paradox is played out between the universal ideals underlying a broader transnational rights-approach and the intended cultural sensitivity by adapting CSE to the targeted context. Feminist scholarship on the ideological, moral and affective underpinnings of CSE is used to question this model’s implied universality and neutrality. The various negotiations, concerns and strategies of NGO-representatives as co-producers of sexuality knowledge in Bangladesh are focused upon. Analysis focuses on how a ‘speakable’, middle-class-oriented ‘proper’ sexuality is invented and managed through affect; how cultural insensitivity and secular normativity with respect to CSE are challenged in discussions concerned a rights-versus-health approach; and how a confident and knowledgeable adolescent or young person is imagined through the emancipatory project attributed to sexuality education. Rather than via equal collaboration, it is argued, adolescent sexuality education in these development aid settings is shaped by powerful transnational and local processes of Othering.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to the editors and the reviewers for their constructive and helpful feedback and support. I am especially indebted to Farhana Alam Bhuiyan, Jhalok Ronjan Talukdar, Konoc Fatama and Saad Adnan Khan for collecting the interview data, and to Els Rommes, Syeda Farjana Ahmed, Sabina Faiz Rashid, Suborna Camellia, Tanveer Hassan and Wenneke Meerstadt for contributions which made this paper possible.

Notes

1. See, for instance, a CSE-based programme developed by the Dutch leading Rutgers Institute, which is also very popular in Bangladesh: https://www.rutgers.international/what-we-do/comprehensive-sexuality-education/depth-world-starts-me (accessed September 5, 2017).