HIV/AIDS education in schools: the ‘unassembled’ youth as a curricular project

Abstract

This paper describes the ways in which administrative structures of the state, techniques of self-government, and practices of social relations exist within HIV/AIDS curricular discourses, a critique enabled by a Foucauldian analytical frame. We argue that youth have been singled out as a particularly risky lot and are therefore prime candidates for HIV/AIDS education. We situate HIV/AIDS education as a method of neoliberal governmentality concerned with regulating the categories of health, risk, and disease in relation to youthful identities. Our aim is to expose the ways in which scientific savoir, values, freedom and restraint work in tandem and hold the potential to shape youthful lives in meaningful ways. We further hope to unmask a certain kind of politics of knowledge that goes, for the most part, unquestioned, because it is linked to normalized ideas about sexuality, morality, individual responsibility, risk, and health.

Keywords:

• Foucault
• governmentality
• HIV/AIDS education
• health policy
• body
• curriculum studies

Notes

1. For interesting studies of agency and resistance in analyses of sex education, see Blackburn (2005), Weis & Carbonell-Medina (2000), and Rasmussen, Rofes, & Talburt (2004).

2. Strategies associated with abstinence are highly contentious in the USA, as they might be in other countries, even though the national government currently privileges such strategies. The reason for such contention might be the federated nature of US political government, where power is shared between national and local governments. Education, for example, is by law locally controlled, and so curricular decisions, particularly with regard to certain ‘sensitive subjects’ (such as AIDS/HIV education), are made at the local level. Thus, the ‘strong abstinence promoting agenda’ seen in the NYC Curriculum does not necessarily represent an ‘American’ curricular strategy as much as a particular community's tactic. This is to say, then, that there is no particular national curriculum or strategy for addressing HIV/AIDS education in the US schools, as there might be in those of other countries.