ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1980s, the tide had turned against progressive approaches to sexuality education in state and federal policy and in school practice. In response to the discourse of abstinence education, progressives advanced “comprehensive” sexuality education, which also went under the name of “abstinence-plus” sex education. Progressives thus played on a linguistic playing field in which abstinence had to be promoted as the ideal so that a discussion of condom use, for example, had to be presented as something young people needed to know in case they “slipped up” and had sex. Progressive sex educators, consequently, were working in an abstinence discourse that limited what it was possible to say or think about sexuality and the “problem” of adolescent sexuality. This meant that progressive models of sexuality education and progressive formulations of the “problem” of adolescent sexuality ended up looking more similar than not. In the end, both conservatives and “liberal” progressives were interested in finding better ways of managing the “problem” of adolescent sexuality. Arguments were thus waged over what the scientific evidence revealed about the “effectiveness” of both approaches. In public policy it was impossible to raise other questions or understand sexuality education in a different way, through a different lens. Meanwhile, the space for sexuality education in the curriculum kept shrinking for a number of reasons, including the continuing decline of health and physical education, where sexuality education has continued to be located in most school districts. Ironically, as the battle over “sex education” reached this state of affairs, something
that we might now know as “sexuality education” was being invented outside the battle, in the liberal arts academy, under the banner of cultural studies. It is true that the term “sexuality” had been around in health-education discourse for some time. In family-life education a distinction was often made between an education that was only or primarily about the “facts” of sex (sexual organs, mechanics of the sex act,
birth control, homosexuality, and so on), and an education that addressed “sex” as part of the “whole child” and the child’s development. “Sexuality” implied a concern with the sphere of human relations within which “sex” happened, including, for example, concerns with “healthy” boy-girl relationships and “healthy” families. But in the new cultural-studies scholarship, sexuality implied something else and something more. Certainly cultural-studies scholars would agree that sex is about much more than just “having sex,” and it has much to do with human relations. But it also has to do with cultural politics: the way power is mobilized and distributed according to categories of class, race, gender, sexual, and other identities, and according to practices of equity and freedom or authoritarianism and domination. This is to say that sex education has a cultural politics. Cultural-studies scholars, working outside the field of sex education, were able to critically address its cultural politics, challenge the commonsense or conventional wisdom within the field, and ask whose interests were being served in sex education. At the time of this writing, cultural-studies perspectives on sexuality education have only a relatively minor impact on the practice of sex education. But that influence seems to be growing. Furthermore, cultural studies implies a much broader concern with the “problem” of adolescent sexuality that cannot be contained within the health field alone. A general framework for a cultural-studies perspective on sex education and the
problem of the adolescent was provided by the great social theorist and historian Michel Foucault in his three volume The History of Sexuality released between 1976 and 1984 in French, and one and two years later as English translations. He died of AIDS the year the last volume in the series was released in French. Foucault was a homosexual, and supported the struggle for gay and lesbian rights. But he was also the father of “queer theory,” in that he questioned the binary oppositions within which sexual identity was regulated and understood in the modern age. These binaries, he felt, were all about establishing and privileging “normal” sexuality, as defined by dominant groups, and at the same time setting it up against “abnormal” sexuality-and the treatment, surveillance, and regulation of abnormal sexuality. This obviously has suggested a rethinking of the “problem” of homosexuality and the homosexual as the problem of establishing a rigid “norm” associated with an idealized version of a white, middle-class, heterosexual, familial sexuality to which everyone is expected to conform. Any performance of sexuality outside this “norm” threatens the stability of the norm, especially when sexual abnormality is not represented and is portrayed as a psychological disorder or as immoral. So too, the sexuality of poor black and Latina unwed mothers must be represented, if it is to be represented at all, as deviant and irresponsible. Foucault’s history of sexuality explores the notion of “normalization” in a broad cultural context, and he associates it with the rise of what he called “disciplinary power”—the power of the scientific and medical disciplines over the body and its “health,” and a power that disciplines sexuality along with the body to make it more utilitarian and docile. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault takes on the dominant historical
narrative of progress, which he identifies with the “repressive hypothesis,” the idea
that people in the Victorian era were more repressed, prudish, and silent about sexuality than we are today. Part of the appeal of the repressive hypothesis, no doubt, is that it fits neatly within the framework established by dominant narratives of progress. As people have become more “enlightened” about sexuality (less “old-fashioned” in popular vernacular), they are presumably less prudish and more willing to engage in a frank and open treatment of sexuality. According to this narrative, the scientific disciplines-medicine, psychology, and psychoanalysishave led the way toward the more enlightened view of sexuality that characterizes contemporary society. History is a story of a long movement from sexual repression, silencing, stigmatization, and moral condemnation toward sexual “liberation.” Thus, people in the modern era are understood as generally more enlightened about sexuality, and less prudish and judgmental than their parents and grandparents were. This is a story that gets told again and again in histories and in popular culture. If it is not altogether wrong, its truths are a little too convenient and conventional to be taken at face value, and Foucault means to disrupt its commonsense logic and thereby call into question the modernist narrative of progress that things are getting better, even if we still have a long way to go. For one thing, the modernist narrative of progress sets up a neat binary opposition between sexual darkness and sexual enlightenment or liberation, with sexual “liberation” understood as the polar opposite of sexual repression and discipline. Foucault questions whether a democratic alternative to the dominant discourse on sexuality can be articulated within the binary by merely choosing an unrepressed sexuality. He argues that radical Freudians (like Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Eric Fromm) are guilty of viewing unrepressed desire as somehow revolutionary in itself, as if capitalism is associated with repressed desire, and socialism with unrepressed desire. Although he finds the radical Freudian argument compelling in some ways, he feels that it too easily slips into a discourse that poses sexual repression and oppression against “something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, … [of] revolution and happiness.”1
