On (not) representing sex in preschool and kindergarten: a psychoanalytic reflection on orders and hints

Abstract

In this conceptual piece I use two pedagogical texts or moments—a preschool/kindergarten diagram representing body parts, and an adult dance class—to explore gaps in curricula and practice with respect to the treatment of young children's sexual curiosity. Looking first at social constructs of children's sexuality and sexual curiosity, and at some of the ways dominant educational discourses, particularly developmentally appropriate practice discourse, respond to them, I argue that complications and ambiguities arise when such constructs collide with the inner lives of teachers and learners. I propose that psychoanalytic theory offers helpful ways to think about these complexities, and call on concepts of pleasure and unpleasure, repression and defence against curiosity to reflect on how education might at times invite and even insist upon the curiosity it seems to be trying to avoid.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the students in Dr Heather Lotherington's 2004 doctoral seminar in the Faculty of Education, York University, for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper, as well as to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for partially funding this work.

Notes

1. The category may be labile, but to use it is to risk reification. ‘The child’ has often been conceptualised as an abstraction or generalised representation. That this is not my intention should become clearer in my discussion of how individuals make relations with constructions of ‘the child’ and ‘the body’. Still, where practicable, I refer to ‘children’ rather than ‘the child’, ‘teachers’ rather than ‘the teacher’ and ‘bodies’ rather than ‘the body’.

2. Tobin is certainly not alone here. His assertions support Fine's (1988) well‐known contention regarding a ‘missing discourse of desire’, and are followed by Allen's (2004) claim that sex education ignores dimensions of pleasure and desire to focus on sexual health as involving ‘the absence of sexually transmitted infections and the avoidance of unintended pregnancies’ (Allen, 2004, p. 151). While Allen's work, like that of Whatley (1994) and Milton (2003), addresses adolescents rather than the younger pupils I am considering here, it is interesting to speculate on possible relations between early childhood education's silence on ‘sexual’ body parts and a later dearth of discussion on pleasurable aspects of using those parts in sexual ways.