“Something that is so overlooked”: joyfully exploring queer bodies and sexualities in sexuality education with teachers in New Brunswick, Canada

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we seek out the possibility of joyful and queered spaces of sexuality education. The sexual lives of queer and transgender youth are often passed over in sex and sexuality education classrooms. In this study, we were interested in exploring how sexual and bodily diversity make an appearance in these often-normative spaces. Through participatory visual research methodologies, we created art and media alongside 40 teachers in the province of New Brunswick, Canada, to look at the ways in which queer sexualities and bodies are made possible and impossible in their sex education practice. In three workshops, we found teachers negotiating the presence of 2SLGBTQI+ sexuality in their classrooms and a missing discourse of queer pleasure – mimicking the province’s tired sexuality education curriculum. We notice that artmaking helps diffuse the discomfort that often accompanies talking (and teaching) about sex in workshop spaces. We argue that sexuality educators need additional professional learning and resources to tend to the sexual lives of young people – and ultimately, a queering of sexuality education that is more intersectional, pleasure-centred, and joyful.

KEYWORDS:

• 2SLGBTQI+
• New Brunswick
• participatory visual research
• pleasure and desire
• queer joy
• sexuality education

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to the teacher-participants and to the larger Supports and Barriers in Teaching Sexual Education in New Brunswick research team: Lynn Randall, Pam Whitty, Katie Cassidy, Emily MacKenzie, Aaron Beaumont, Katie Hamill, Abbey LeJeune, and Brittany Murphy at the University of New Brunswick, Anik Dubé at the Université de Moncton, Pam Malins at Wilfred Laurier University, and Katie MacEntee at the University of Toronto.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We use the language of ‘queerness and bodily diversity’ to gesture towards the multitude of bodies and sexualities that make up a sexuality education classroom. Sexuality education programming often ignores or downplays the range of sexualities and body types that exist in schools (Roberts and Labuski 2023). We actively seek to disrupt these assumptions.

2. We are inspired by Roberts and Labuski’s (2023) work on bodily excess in sexuality education. Bodily unruliness refers to the messy nature of the human body – which cannot be easily contained within the narrow aims of sexuality education.

3. Settler-colonialism has eradicated existing sexual and gender diversity in this territory, and for this reason, it is necessary to foreground Two Spirit identities at the beginning of the acronym (Reid 2019).

4. Original Policy: Government of New Brunswick (2020). Policy 713 [original]. Retrieved June 23, 2023 from: http://asd-n.nbed.nb.ca/schooldoc/policy-713-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity

5. Amended Policy: Government of New Brunswick (2023). Policy 713 [amended]. Retrieved June 23, 2023 from: https://www2.gnb.ca/content/gnb/en/news/news_release.2023.06.0297.html

6. The September 2023 1 Million March 4 Children, for example, rallied against the inclusion of sexuality or gender identity in Canadian schools. Having attended the counter protests in Fredericton, we saw the embodiment of transphobic discourse, and we also saw the Premier and Education Minister greet these protesters while not engaging with the counter-protest (see: Poitras 2023).

7. Lesbian bed death is a tired trope that suggests that lesbians stop engaging in sexual relations in their long-term partnerships. We push back against this stereotype (see also, Frederick et al. 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under Grant number 435-2020-0114. The views expressed are the authors’ own.