Sexual choreographies of the classroom: movement in sexuality education

ABSTRACT

This paper is interested in thinking more about sexuality education at school. As such, it is concerned with a mundane and unacknowledged feature of the sexuality classroom – the mapping of movement. While human movement is a familiar focus of educational research, the movement of things is not. With reference to Barad’s concept of intra-activity, the paper maps human-non-human movements and characterises these as a sexual choreography of schooling. Instead of asking what does movement mean or reveal about sexuality education, I attend to the event movement inaugurates. Predominantly theoretical, the paper weaves together ideas from conventionally disparate disciplinary fields. These include Edensor’s concept of rhythm from geography, Eggermont’s notion of the choreography of schooling from education, and Barad’s spacetimemattering from quantum physics. This theorisation enables a recognition of movement as a force in human-non-human classroom intra-actions implicated in the becoming of sexuality education as event.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality
• schooling
• space
• movement
• new materialism
• intra-activity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here after referred to as Aotearoa-NZ.

2. In Aotearoa-NZ, ‘decile rankings’ indicate the extent to which a school draws its students from low socio-economic communities, with decile 1 schools containing the highest proportion of these students and decile 10 the lowest (verbatim Ministry of Education, 2016).

3. I insert ‘moment of’ here to aid reader understanding although within a Baradian conceptualisation of spacetimemattering there are no conventional ‘moments’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DP110101173].