Feeling abstinent? Feeling comprehensive? Touching the affects of sexuality curricula

Abstract

This interpretive study draws on interdisciplinary scholarship on affect and knowledge to ask: toward what feelings do abstinence-only and comprehensive sexuality education curricula direct us? A methodology that is attuned to double exposures is discussed, and one abstinence-only sexuality education curriculum and one comprehensive sexuality education curriculum are reviewed. The interpretation provides an alternative to the usual representation of these curricula as oppositional. Both of the curricula direct knowers to feel sure, optimistic, and free. Both curricula evidence longings for stable knowledge and guaranteed meanings. Finally, learners are directed to feel that knowledge can solve all problems smoothly and happily. Mistakes, negativism, and confusion are excluded from both sets of sexual knowledge. Implications of this interpretation for changing sexuality education are discussed.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the importance of Jen Gilbert, as my initial audience for this article, the helpful suggestions of an anonymous reviewer, and the excellent scholarly assistance provided by Rachel Oppenheim. Thank you, all.

Notes

^1. This analysis is indebted to an enormous interdisciplinary scholarship that has critically examined binaries such as religious/secular (for example, Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008), human/animal (for example, Haraway 1989), oriental/western (Said 1978), white/black (Hall 1997; Morrison 1992), and progress/decline (Bederman 1995).

^3. Ann Pellegrini (2009) interprets the turn to affect as part of an anxious response by US secular academics to fundamentalist religions, Christian and Muslim.

^2. See Flatley (2008) for a review of the affective turn across disciplines. There are widely varying views of the distinctions between affect, feeling, and emotions. See Flatley (2008), Ngai (2005), and Probyn (2005) for introductions to the distinctions that some scholars make. I use the terms interchangeably, sidestepping the idea that emotion and affect, for example, ‘follow different logics and pertain to different orders’ (Massumi 2002, 27). In education, ‘affect’ is an older term with a more formal, or professional, connotation than emotions or feelings. For example, the ‘affective’ domain was described and brought into being through behavioral objectives in the 1960s (Mager 1962).

^4. Some exceptions to this general neglect include Boler (1999), Fine (1988), Hargreaves (1998) and Zembylas (2002, 2003); their bibliographies provide additional work on emotions. Using phenomenological perspectives, Maxine Greene (2000) has interrogated the feelings involved in learning and teaching the arts. Diane Ravitch (2004) collects numerous claims about the detrimental emotional effects of particular words and topics on students.

^5. Nostalgia is used in many different ways across different disciplines; see Pickering and Keightley (2006) and Smith (2000) for other approaches.

^6. See Jakobsen (2000, 2002) and Jakobsen and Pellegrini (2008) for a much longer historical view of the co-constitutive relations between religion and secularism in the United States.

^7. Abstinence-only education is a shortened term for abstinence-only-until-marriage educational approaches, which teach that abstaining from sexuality before marriage is the only 100% safe and healthy approach for young people. Abstinence-plus curricula promote abstaining as the best approach, but also teach about being faithful and using condoms. Abstinence-plus programs are often referred to as ABC approaches and are the most popular educational approach to HIV/AIDS prevention.

^8. In her study of sex education in South Carolina, Fields (2008) claims that AO curricula are focused upon and directed to keeping white girls' purity. The predominance of photographs of white people in Sex Respect can be read as support for Fields' analysis.

^9. While supposedly God-centered, this view of time and knowledge invoked for me the spatial horizon of the US Midwest that continues flat and uninterrupted as far as the eye can see and where nothing much happens.

^10. While the SIECUS Guidelines are not a formal curriculum in the way that Sex Respect is (a set of sequenced lessons with objectives and activities), I selected them for review because they are such an important presence in sexuality education in the United States. The principles and concepts inform local comprehensive sex education curriculum initiatives, in their development and evaluation.

^11. Drawing on Anita Harris's (2004) Future Girl analysis, it would be interesting to explore Juno, and a Girl Knows Best sitcom spin-off, for how her girl-power relates to knowledge and authority in Father Knows Best.

^12. Gilbert (2004) focuses on teachers' desire for ‘transparency’ in language in sex education, which is clearly related to the stability of knowledge discussed here.