ABSTRACT
This paper is a discussion of our experiences as women and feminists working and teaching sexuality and sexual identity in the field of health and social work. Teaching in this area not only requires that students understand the very complex theoretical and practice issues at a personal and professional level, but that they are also able to transfer theories into practice to enable them to work more effectively at an individual and structural level. Vocational training is explicitly about the process of grounding theory in practice; about the relationship between theory and lived experience. Thus, teaching sexuality and sexual identity within this context requires the student not only to develop an understanding of how patriarchal heterosexuality is structurally manifest and how this impacts upon the individual, but to apply this knowledge to their work with service users. Achieving this is difficult, since from our experience, we would argue that there is an absence of a theoretical and practice discourse that acknowledges and celebrates lesbian and bisexual women’s lifestyles and identities. Rather, if a discourse exists, it is concerned with promoting and maintaining a model of Traditional Familialism (Redman, 1994) which results in either ignoring or pathologizing alternative lifestyles and experiences. This paper aims to identify the struggles involved in introducing an epistemology of sexuality into the curriculum that brings together the theory and lived experience of different sexual identities and behaviour. This inevitably involves challenging patriarchal heterosexuality and exploring the implications for lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual women. We will start by discussing what we understand the context of teaching and learning to be in our substantive areas, with reference to the influence that current changes in higher education have on inclusion and celebration of diversity.
