The imagined community of sexually liberal citizens: educational reforms since the 1970s

ABSTRACT

Recent integration discourses in Europe locate problems of equality, gender, and sexuality among migrant youth. Educating and testing the values of future citizens is supposed to guarantee their conformity with ‘western’ and ‘modern’ values. By analyzing educational reform discourses in multicultural Luxembourg, the paper aims to challenge these contemporary narratives in two ways: (1) In a historical analysis, the paper traces conservative reform resistance in the case of sex education which is often overlooked due to the focus on migrants; (2) In placing sex education’s reform legitimation and resistance within (a) broader educational reform discourses of inequality and citizenship and (b) contemporary narrations of the reforms and their taboos, the paper reconstructs how liberals and conservatives join an alliance over sexuality education of ‘the Other’. The sociological–historical discourse analysis critically questions the ethnicization of sexuality by disclosing its homogenizing use to cover conservative resistance within the citizen’s community.

KEYWORDS:

• Sex education
• sexuality
• reform
• citizenship
• exclusion
• migration
• ethnicization

Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Labaree and the members of the Workshop Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Nation at Stanford University for their helpful feedback, Stephanie Hofmann for help with interview transcripts, and Jos Massard, Catherina Schreiber, and Ragnhild Barbu for some of the archival sources.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The guided interviews were conducted in Luxembourg between February 2015 and February 2016. The selected interviewees were former members of the ministry of education or of program commissions (group of teachers appointed by the ministry to develop curricula changes), politicians, and teachers active in political parties or teacher unions. The interviewer initiated descriptions as well as narrations of the reform processes, particularly the historical development, the main lines of controversy, important agents, experience of reforms and their impact today.

2. All quotes from sources are translated from German, French or Luxembourgish to English by the author.

3. All interview citations are translated from German to English by the author.

4. The first center of Planning Familial opened in 1967 and was supported in the early 1970s by social-democratic agents who later became important politicians, like Minister for Justice Robert Krieps, or President of the LSAP Ben Fayot. The Planning Familial received public funding since the social-democratic government of 1974–1979, and offers medical and psycho-social counseling and sexuality education for young people (in and outside of schools). Today, they have three centers in Luxembourg (cf. Planning Familial, 2005).

5. One interviewee even held the opinion that in 2012, when protests against the liberal abortion law in Luxembourg took place, only right activists from neighboring countries had come to protest in front of the parliament and ‘not a single Luxembourgian man’ attended the protest. (Sex education reformer and socialist politician, l. 463).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fonds National de la Recherche Luxembourg.