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AbstractNetflix series Sex Education is popular with young people in a way school-based programmes rarely are. Analyzing the first three seasons, this paper explores what and how educative content is offered and how young people are addressed as sexual subjects. It is argued that Sex Education radically expands the conventional content of school-based programmes and attends to many critiques young people repeatedly make of them. Sex Education offers an example of how to educate about sexuality, via a queer and sex-positive approach where young people are understood as legitimate sexual beings who are authorities on their own sexual lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is it ethical to want students to become non-queerphobic as an outcome of our teaching? This question is situated within thinking about teaching for social justice. It takes an event where a student challenges a course's queer pedagogy and thinks with it to expose 'the inherent paradox of education'. This is the notion that in its desires for individual and social transformation, education presumes to know how students should behave and how the world should be. The paper considers how educators might approach this paradox more ethically. It argues for a reconceptualisation of education as an 'uncertain event' that involves approaching teaching without preconceived agendas about what educational encounters will eventuate. It also involves a reconfiguration of ethics and education, where ethics is understood as implied rather than applied. This rearrangement invites educators to engage in a sensible orientation to teaching where attention is paid to its nuances, textures and complexities.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to understandings of COVID society by offering insights into the lived experience of lockdown. It reveals how larger social and economic impacts of the virus unfold in one suburban town in New Zealand. Employing "smellwalks," it mobilizes smell as an empirical tool to understand lockdown experience. Drawing from the "sensory turn" this method recognizes smell as a way of knowing social existence and gleaning non-discursive and embodied insights into the global pandemic. This paper endeavors to develop sensory methodology within urban sociology by revealing how smell furthers understandings of place and modes of being during lockdown. It argues changes in suburban smells signal disruption to daily life as a result of the government's social and economic pandemic-response measures. For instance, the empty cold smell of the mall usually warm and bustling with activity, conveys the isolation and loss of social connectedness produced by lockdown restrictions. Similarly, the dry smell of concrete dust created by the closure and demolition of a high-street bank reflects the slowing of the national economy. Attention to smell enables insight into new modes of being for residents that involve heightened anxiety around viral contagion and a slower, quieter, environmentally cleaner way of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our conversations about sexuality, Kathleen Quinlivan and I mused over how a subject as potentially vibrant and life-enhancing as sexuality education could so often be taught in uninspiring and disembodied ways. Students' existing critique of much sexuality education is that it is typically disease and danger focused, marginalises the sensuous body and fails to address their lived experiences. Motivated by the wildness and adventure that Kathleen inspired in her work, this paper is offered as a provocation that attempts to attend to sexuality education's pedagogy differently. Employing the idea of 'smellwalks' as an educational activity, it proposes a reconceptualisation of the subject in ways that endeavour to engage the body and the sensuous. The notion of smellwalk pedagogy challenges the conventional aims of sexuality education and how these are mobilised in the classroom. In the spirit of Kathleen's interest in unruly aspects of sexuality and gender, smellwalks seek to reconfigure the purpose and pedagogy of sexuality education and the nature of sexuality itself. The point of thinking about such a pedagogical experiment is to capture the sense of playfulness and adventure currently missing from most sexuality programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a form of sensuous methodology known as smellwalks. Smellwalks are a method which require a reorientation of the senses to temporarily emphasize the information received from the nose. During a smellwalk, the researcher employs an active form of smelling to examine their environment that diverges from normal smell perception. In this research, smellwalks are deployed to investigate the experience of lockdown in a suburban town in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Six solo walks were undertaken, three during lockdown and three out of it, to compare the presence and absence of smells during these periods. In attuning to the invisible, intangible, mundane, and small details of life via smell, smellwalks opened opportunities for new embodied and material knowledge about lockdown experience. It is argued that smellwalks offer a sensory and embodied method with the capacity to attend to more than vision and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the COVID-19 pandemic shape subjectivity? This paper is concerned with contributing to theorising subjectivity at an ontological level. It draws on a feminist new materialist understanding of subjectivity as an intra-active becoming of human-non-human matter that includes smell. Smellwalks are mobilised to apprehend how subjectivity is altered via restrictions around movement and social connection during lockdown. This sensory method recognises knowing is not simply a cognitive practice and that odour actively shapes understandings of ourselves and the world. The varying presence and absence of odours in and out of lockdown eventuate a re-arrangement of subjectivity which draws on Vannini's (2020) notion of atmospheric dis-ease. Lockdown produces a subjectivity of dis-ease which generates changes in perception of self and others, as sources of potential viral contagion. Lockdown's material conditions engender a 'socially flattened' and 'suspended subjectivity' as our 'normal' selves are experienced as being put on hold until the global crisis abates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs new materialist theory to the accounts of women who were pregnant, giving birth or parenting new-borns during the Australian bushfires of 2019/2020. As feminist scholars we are concerned with the inequitable responsibility accorded to women during this time to limit their (un)born children's exposure to smoke. Drawing on Barad's (2007) relational ontology we trace how (non)human phenomena like 'smoke', 'public health advice' and discourses of 'the good mother' work intra-actively to establish conditions of possibility in relation to mother's agency and responsibility in this crisis. Via in-depth interviews with 25 women, we discovered these coagulating forces meant many experienced feelings of 'powerlessness' and subsequent 'guilt' at their inability to prevent smoke inhalation for their (un)born children. To challenge this burden of responsibility, we (re)configure conventional notions of 'agency' and 'responsibility' within a new materialist frame. When agency is understood as an intra-active becoming and response-ability as preceding the subject, responsibility for the air shifts to a recognition that everyone/thing is complicit in the world's differential becoming. We extend this thinking to consider human response-ability and agency in relation to the climate change that has been attributed to causing the fires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some LGBTTIQA+ students maintain campus is a safe space despite also detailing significant discriminatory practices they have witnessed or experienced there. This article explores this paradox drawing insights from new materialism and geographical research. Predominantly theoretical in orientation, it takes the notion of 'dwelling with' from Noora Pyyry's posthuman work in geography and thinks with it, in relation to participants' experiences of being LGBTTIQA+ on campus. These moments offer openings for undertaking a reconceptualization of campus space as neither inherently safe, nor unsafe. Thinking with new materialism enables an understanding of campus space as relational, ongoing and actively engaged in how students experience it. From this perspective, campus safety is not simply secured by the actions of individuals and presence of institutional equity policy. We argue shifting constellations of bodies, objects, and their entanglements create campus space as paradoxically safe-un-safe, potentially engendering a new politics of campus safety. This new politics recognises the issue of campus safety as more expansive than a problem of individuals or structural discrimination. Encompassing a new materialist understanding of space, campus safety is reconceptualised as contingent upon intra-active human-non-human entanglements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the schooling experiences of 12 fa'afāfine and fakaleiti who attended an all-boys faith-based secondary school in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Fa'afāfine are Samoan, and fakaleiti Tongans who are assigned male at birth, but enact varying degrees and types of behaviour deemed as feminine. There are currently no in-depth qualitative studies that examine the schooling experiences of these young people. Within the existing literature the experiences of fa'afāfine and fakaleiti are typically subsumed under the umbrella of transgender and/or non-binary students. This study examines participants' recollections of daily experiences of being fa'afāfine and fakaleiti at an all-boys school where any expression of femininity was frequently disallowed and denigrated. In this highly masculinised environment, participants describe the struggle to be 'like-women' and the cisgender discrimination they faced. Incidents of bullying, physical assault and marginalisation from teachers and students along with the pathologisation and erasure of their identities within school curricula and practices were daily occurrences. These accounts contribute to an emerging and broader picture of schools as cisgender spaces, in which educational structures and processes reinforce the idea there are only two genders, and that gender is based on sex assigned at birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with how teachers manage homophobia at school. It examines how they deal with homophobia directed at students, and instances when teachers become the recipients of homophobia themselves. This dual focus, on teachers as both the perpetrators and recipients of homophobia, adds complexity to existing studies concerning how homophobia operates in schools. In previous studies, it has been LGBTIQA+ teachers who have provided accounts of homophobia they have experienced. In this research, heterosexual students offer these narratives. Via these accounts, students acknowledge and corroborate teachers' voices in other studies. Students' depictions also reveal nuances in homophobia's operation and that heterosexual teachers can sometimes be its target. In existing literature, LGBTIQA+ students typically provide narratives about whether teachers are effective at addressing homophobia. In the current study, heterosexual students deliver these accounts, confirming their LGBTIQA+ peers' assessment that teachers often ignore homophobia or respond ineffectually. When heterosexual students identify homophobia, they lift the burden for acknowledging and addressing this discrimination from the LGBTIQA+ community. Retelling incidents in this way, recognizes homophobia is not the sole responsibility of individual perpetrators and recipients, but an issue that implicates the whole school and its culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'How can we apprehend homophobia as more than we currently know?' This paper attempts a conceptual intervention to rethink current approaches to homophobia in schools. It draws on ideas from feminist philosopher Todd around attention and openness to uncertainty. It also employs queer theoretical notions of subjectless antihomophobia education from Airton, arguing there may be utility in understanding that homophobia is not held by a subject – as an attitude or set of meanings used against others. Interview narratives from a two-year research project exploring the production of sexual meanings at school offer a window into acknowledging homophobia as subjectless. That is, homophobia does not need a queer-identified subject to be its target to operate. Nor, does homophobia need an ignorant or fearful (human) subject to perpetuate it. Subjectless anti-homophobia education requires understanding homophobia as something in which all of us are implicated, and where homophobia is never ours alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homophobia is an enduring issue within schooling contexts internationally. This paper attempts to rethink homophobia from the perspective of heterosexual students' accounts of bearing witness to it. Within the existing literature it has been LGBTQ students who have held the responsibility for naming and recounting homophobia. This paper re-orients this conventional account by positioning heterosexual students as its narrators to see what this might reveal about homophobia's operation at school. While this strategy does not disrupt the 'othering' and 'victimization' of LGBT youth in these stories, it has other effects. When heterosexual students name homophobia as unjust, it is possible to see the instability of the victim/perpetrator binary that typically structures these accounts. Narratives of participants in this study did not fit neatly into this binary, revealing its inability to capture the complexity of homophobia's operation. To have any hope of effectively addressing homophobia at school, we need to move beyond the victim/perpetrator binary. This is because it masks some of homophobia's more nuanced moves, such as targeting difference, rather than sexual identity exclusively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some of the challenges of publishing photographs generated as part of sexuality research. It aims to initiate discussion of these issues to enable sexuality researchers to consider and navigate the use of images in their work. Examples highlighting these difficulties are employed from a photo-method project which examined young people, sexuality and schooling. It is argued that existing child-sex-panics rendered these images risky and intensified their scrutiny by gatekeeping forces. The discussion contributes to a broader conversation within the field of sexualities about the constitution of sexuality research as dirty work. Specifically, the paper investigates how some publishing and editing practices might be conceptualised as constituting techniques that construct sexuality research as dirty work. By not publishing photos which form part of sexuality research, the knowledge it is possible for sexuality researchers to generate and circulate is subsequently curtailed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to reconceptualize qualitative research around young people, sexuality, and schooling. In a bid to contribute to what has been coined "post-qualitative" research, it grapples with questions of epistemology and ontology which some argue much humanist methodology negates. This discussion is situated within current debates about the utility of method and a context in which sexuality research and methodology appears to have stagnated. Taking two moments from sexuality research previously conceived within a humanist qualitative methodological paradigm, the article thinks them with feminist new materialist thought. The aim is to consider what new methodological, ethical, and ontological possibilities feminist new materialist ideas afford for research in the field of sexualities and beyond. The article argues that new materialist thought invites an open-ness and response-ability from researchers which reorients the ethics of sexuality research and the nature of sexuality itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is interested in thinking more about sexuality education at school. As such, it is concerned with a mundane and unacknowledged feature of the sexuality classroom - the mapping of movement. While human movement is a familiar focus of educational research, the movement of things is not. With reference to Barad’s concept of intra-activity, the paper maps human-non-human movements and characterises these as a sexual choreography of schooling. Instead of asking what does movement mean or reveal about sexuality education, I attend to the event movement inaugurates. Predominantly theoretical, the paper weaves together ideas from conventionally disparate disciplinary fields. These include Edensor’s concept of rhythm from geography, Eggermont’s notion of the choreography of schooling from education, and Barad’s spacetimemattering from quantum physics. This theorisation enables a recognition of movement as a force in human-non-human classroom intra-actions implicated in the becoming of sexuality education as event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the mapping of a ‘new’ ontology of sexuality at school. Drawing on new feminist materialist thinking from Barad (2007), Bennett (2004) and Lenz Taguchi (2013), it analyses photographs from a project on the sexual cultures of schooling in a way that takes ‘things’ or ‘matter’ seriously. Seeking to disrupt the idea that humans represent the only site for, and expression of sexuality, it explores how matter and meaning are co-constitutive in sexuality's becoming at school. Instead of seeing sexuality as discursively constituted through a plethora of schooling processes and practices, another proposition is offered. Sexuality does not pre-exist matter/meaning but comes into being via their relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to trouble the conflation of photo-anonymisation with ethical research practice, as is often promoted by institutional ethics review. Contributing to discussions of ‘visual ethics’ and the application of photographic methods in visual research, it poses the question: what is the effect of the anonymisation of photographs on the integrity of visual research and generation of new knowledge? Discussion unfolds via the exploration of school-based research around young people and sexualities. Examples of photo-anonymisation are examined from a project concerning the sexual cultures of schooling, employing a combination of photo-diary and photo-elicitation methods. The way in which anonymisation techniques meant to protect participants from harm, such as photo-cropping, facial blurring and pixelation, may be counterproductive to this aim, is revealed. Applying such techniques can undermine the agency of participants to convey their ideas and experiences as they intended. It is also argued that anonymisation processes can make a mockery of the integrity of visual methods by casting their meaning and content into obscurity. Such practices can consequently impoverish the generation of new meanings and the advancement of a disciplinary area – which, in the current study, is research on sexualities and schooling. This discussion seeks to encourage visual researchers to reflect upon anonymisation, inciting them to consider the implications of this practice for the ethical treatment of participants and the generation of new meanings in their chosen area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is concerned with interrogating what has evolved as "normal" representations of the schooling experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students in literature concerned with social/sexual justice. It argues that these representations necessitate understanding LGBT within a binary of either "victims" or "heroes," and this constitution obscures these young peoples' lived schooling realities. In queer style, the article endeavors to expose the "normal" in these representations and consider their conditions of possibility for understanding LGBT students' schooling experience within this dyad. It is proposed that this portrayal limits how we might understand LGBT students' schooling experiences beyond this dualistic binary. To refuse this flat portrayal and lend complexity to it, the article draws on findings from a project around the sexual cultures of schooling that employed photo methods. Identifying inconsistencies between a participant's photo and her narrative explanation of it as an entry point for thought, Barad's concept of intra-activity is drawn upon to think through this binary problem. In this way, the article gestures toward an understanding of LGBT that is neither victim nor hero, nor some combination of both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks, what more can we think in relation to debates around young people's use of mobile phones at school? Rather than attempting to answer the question of whether mobile phones are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for young people, this paper recasts the debate's ontological underpinnings. To do this feminist appropriations of the Deleuzian concept of assemblage and a relational materialist notion of ‘more-than-human’ are drawn on. By recognising sexuality-as-assemblage, it is possible to see more-than-human elements (such as mobile phones) as implicated in the becoming of sexuality at school. This conceptualisation implies new texture and dimensionality to the wider project of (re)producing sexual meanings and identities at school. It also necessitates acknowledging an ontologically different understanding of the human-non-human divide, that decentres young people and/or phones as to ‘to blame’ for ‘negative’ practices like sexting. Instead, agency manifests via the intra-activity that occurs when mobile phones and young people are in-relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the intricate processes of pedagogical teaching that highlight the teacher's attitude in regulating sexual identities and sexual behavior in sexuality education. It explores the purposes and processes of teaching comprehensive sexuality education in diverse communities. The authors argue about the diverse educational response to the dominant forms of authority, subordination, and prevalent systems of hegemony in the teaching practices of sexuality education.

In a discussion of Deleuze's theorization of concepts, Todd May asks “what can a concept do with that which cannot be identified?” Or to put it another way, May writes – “A concept is a way of addressing the difference that lies beneath the identities we experience.” This is not to say that identities, concepts, and experiences are linked in particular ways. The possibility of extending what a concept can do is also brought under scrutiny by Ann Burlein, who draws on the work of Elizabeth Wilson to argue “Feminism needs to engage with scientific authority not simply at those sites where it [science] takes women as its objects, but also in the neutral zones, in those places where feminism appears to have no place or political purchase.” “Why not feminist critiques of the liver or the stomach, she asks?” Such styles of thought are the inspiration for this paper. We argue that queer concepts in education should not stop at places where education takes queer bodies as its objects, but that queer concepts have an important role to play in places where, at first glance, they appear to have no place or purchase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexuality and humour share a fraught relationship at school, so that how humour might be productively employed in sexuality education constitutes a ‘risky’ consideration. This paper explores the role of humour in sexuality education as observed in a Year 9 New Zealand health class. Adding to existing literature emphasising students' use of humour at school, it also considers how teachers might productively mobilise humour in the classroom. Findings reveal that while humour serves established purposes for students such as consolidating heterosexual masculinities, securing peer group hierarchies and disrupting learning agendas, it may hold other pedagogically productive possibilities. Potential uses include the relief of monotony, engaging with the needs of particular cultural groups of students, reinforcing taught information and reducing apprehension around potentially uncomfortable topics. Via this empirical exploration of the mobilisation of humour, the paper endeavours to open its potential as a conceptual site of possibility in sexuality education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the methodological politics of researching at the intersections of sexuality, culture and religion in secondary schools. It draws on experiences during a project concerned with how to address cultural and religious diversity in sexuality education in Australia and New Zealand. The paper focuses on two methodological sticking points, one occurring inside academia and the other outside, in schools. The first coheres around the process of gaining ethics approval from multiple institutional committees and the second accesses schools for participation. These sticking points are conceptualized as effects of a set of discursive and material constraints which are idiosyncratic to school-based sexualities research. We argue that discourses of sexuality and young people are mobilized in both spaces and intersect with a social moment of ‘risk anxiety’ in ways that shape the methodological possibilities of the research. These discourses serve to constitute sexualities research as ‘risky’ and ‘controversial’, an image which impedes the generation of new knowledge in the field. By rendering challenges of this research visible and discursively deconstructing the reasons for them, we refuse to dismiss school-based sexualities research as ‘too hard’. Instead, we aim to keep this topic firmly on the educational research agenda by alerting researchers to its challenges so they may prepare for them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How might we understand young men’s sexual embodiment at school? This article is concerned with the body as a site for the intersection of masculinities and sexualities at school. In a bid to contribute to existing narrative analyses of young men’s sexualities in educational contexts, this research employs visual methods in order to “picture” these intersections. Findings are drawn from an exploratory study in two secondary schools, where photo diaries and photo elicitation were undertaken with twenty-two students aged sixteen to eighteen years. It is argued that, the idea of boys as “sexy bodies,” that is, bodies that are experienced and viewed as sexual, is missing. This omission occurs in two ways; as a focus for school-based research and as an understanding of young men’s schooled experience. Through an analysis of enfleshed bodies captured by photo methods, the ways in which male sexuality is corporeally manifested as active, desiring, heteronormative and “sexy” are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper revisits the missing discourse of female desire [Fine, M. 1988. Sexuality, schooling and adolescent females: The missing discourse of desire.Harvard Educational Review58, no. 1: 29–53] in secondary schools. Instead of echoing previous studies that have documented how female desire is missing, this research starts from the premise that female desire is an everyday (unofficial) presence at school. Through photo-diaries and photo-elicitation, this paper attempts to materialise [Butler, J. 1993.Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge] female desire to literally ‘see it’ through young women's own eyes. In articulation with feminist debates around young women's exercise of agency, it argues that in relation to female sexual desire, this may look different from what we expect. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari [2004.Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press], it explores how ruptures to normative female desire are constantly reterritorialised and subsequently more ‘frustrated’ than claims of easily perceptible change. In this way, it seeks to add to a more nuanced and complex theorisation of female desire at school, rather than only as an absence or a problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sexuality education and preventive sexual abuse education emerged from different historical moments and social movements. Consequently, they are often taught as separate subjects in secondary schools. This paper seeks to highlight how this separation denies space for young people to grapple with the concept of consent, the art of negotiation, the interrelatedness and acknowledgement of pleasure, danger and ambivalence within sexually intimate relations and the complexities of sexualities. Importantly, this separation also negates possibilities for education to embrace a discourse of ethical erotics that includes space for the exploration of desire and pleasure; for it is not possible to discuss ethical erotics when one is not allowed to discuss ethics and erotics within the same conversation. To highlight this argument, we analyse the Health and Physical Education Curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand which states that programmes for the prevention of sexual abuse should not be taught concurrently or consecutively with programmes that emphasise the positive aspects of sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with extending existing understandings about the role of schools as sexualising agencies. It seeks to uncover previously undisturbed spatial and material dimensions of schooling with regards to sexualities and their implication for how young people learn about sexualities at school. In this regard, the paper asks: how do apparently mundane spatial and material schooling arrangements constitute particular sexual meanings and identities for students? A visual methodology is employed to capture schooling places that students identify as constitutive of sexual meanings and identities. How students’ embodied sexual practices negotiate and contest these spatial/material configurations is also investigated. Through this analysis, the paper makes a theoretical contribution to an understanding of space as an in process materiality. It is concluded that the spatial and material arrangements of schooling contribute to a larger schooling project concerned with muting and regulating young people’s sexual subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The idea that pleasure might form a part of sexuality education is no longer a ‘new’ idea in the field of sexuality studies. In this paper we examine how originally conceived notions of pleasure have been ‘put to work’ and theoretically ‘taken up’ in relation to sexuality and education. It is our contention that because of the nature of discourse and varying cultural and political contexts, pleasure has been operationalised in ways we did not intend or foresee. Throughout this discussion we seek to discern the discursive limits of visions of pleasure to illuminate their normalising potential. Drawing on Foucault's thoughts about pleasure as having ‘no passport’ and queer theoretical understandings of this concept, we argue for a re-conceptualisation of the potential of pleasure in sexuality education. In particular we identify the need for wedging open spaces for the possibility of ethical pleasures, in forms that are not heteronormatively pre-conceived or mandatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that pleasure might form a part of sexuality education is no longer a ‘new’ idea in the field of sexuality studies. In this paper we examine how originally conceived notions of pleasure have been ‘put to work’ and theoretically ‘taken up’ in relation to sexuality and education. It is our contention that because of the nature of discourse and varying cultural and political contexts, pleasure has been operationalised in ways we did not intend or foresee. Throughout this discussion we seek to discern the discursive limits of visions of pleasure to illuminate their normalising potential. Drawing on Foucault's thoughts about pleasure as having ‘no passport’ and queer theoretical understandings of this concept, we argue for a re-conceptualisation of the potential of pleasure in sexuality education. In particular we identify the need for wedging open spaces for the possibility of ethical pleasures, in forms that are not heteronormatively pre-conceived or mandatory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until now, the inclusion of a discourse of pleasure in sexuality education has been constituted as a ‘progressive’ and ‘liberatory’ undertaking. This article seeks to scrutinize the political and moral motivations that have underpinned this discourse by tracing the origins of its emergence. It employs a series of anecdotes from the author’s everyday experience, as a launching point for thinking theoretically about how this discourse might be ‘being put to work’ in educational settings. With recourse to the writings of queer theorists, I interrogate the possibilities and limits of a discourse of pleasure in regard to its social justice aims. It is argued that the ‘politically depressed’ picture these anecdotes suggest, is a consequence of a particular conceptual framing of ‘agency’ that implies future-focused and advancing action. The article proposes new ways of thinking about pleasure’s agency, which hold in tension ‘leftist politics’ and queer theoretical understandings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is concerned with how to analyse photographs produced during research on sexualities and schooling. Photo-diaries and photo-elicitation were employed in an examination of the sexual cultures of two New Zealand secondary schools. This visual methodology sought to disclose spatial and embodied dimensions of sexualities at school while centring and valuing students’ perspectives. In an attempt to answer the question ‘what does this photograph really mean’, the author experiments with a series of analytical accounts conceptualised as ‘realist’, ‘interpretivist’, ‘performative’ and ‘materialist’ approaches. These readings are interrogated for their political and ontological effects. On the basis of the project's aims of taking young people's perspectives seriously and foregrounding material reality, an argument for a ‘materialist’ reading is made. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sexualities and schooling is often constituted as a ‘controversial’ topic. Similarly, photo-methods are an unconventional data collection method in educational research associated with ‘risk’ in school settings. Given this context, why use photo-methods in research on sexualities and schooling? While acknowledging the challenges of using photo-methods in school-based research I suggest their capacity to disclose qualitatively different insights about this field. These findings are drawn from the use of photo-diaries and photo-elicitation in a project examining the sexual cultures of two New Zealand secondary schools. The value of these methods lies in their ability to explore broader features of sexualities and schooling than the official curriculum, policy and classroom practices. These methods can reveal embodied and spatial dimensions of sexuality which inhere in the unofficial minutiae of everyday schooling experiences. The participant driven process of taking photos can facilitate access to what some researchers conceptualize as the ‘unknown, unknowns’. For those concerned with the educative potential of research, photo-diaries might also be helpful in generating participants’ critical reflection of an otherwise taken-for-granted lived reality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The issue of whether to 'come out' in class has a poignant history in the literature by gay, lesbian and bisexual educators on this topic. By comparison few heterosexuals have publicly written about whether they explicitly reveal their heterosexuality to students. This paper contributes to the enduring debate about whether to 'come out' in class from the perspective of a heterosexual. It explores the questions: Should heterosexuals come out in class? Can this serve as a pedagogically effective strategy for those striving to achieve anti-heteronormative classrooms? The arguments for and against coming out by lesbian, gay and bisexual writers are canvassed to discern which are relevant for heterosexuals. I argue that the question of whether to come out is as pedagogically relevant to heterosexuals as those who are gay, lesbian and bisexual. Failing to identify explicitly as heterosexual can serve to reinforce the homosexual-heterosexual binary, where silence about heterosexual identity maintains its 'normal' and 'natural' status. I also contend that 'coming out' as heterosexual necessitates a strategy that undermines the dominance of this identity (which an assertion of this identity can reinforce). To come out by 'undoing' the heterosexual self is offered as one approach to this dilemma. This 'undoing' strives to denaturalise and decentre heterosexual identity and the heteronormative practices which sustain its privileged position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers whether 'straight' identified researchers can produce anti-normative knowledge. This question derives from debates around what (if any) contribution 'straight' researchers can make to queer theory/research. While recognizing that political and ethical decisions are integral to this discussion, I focus on the epistemological implications of straight researchers' participation in queer theory/research. This discussion grapples with a wider issue within identity politics around the participation of researchers who are regarded as representing the 'norm'. I trouble the relationship between identity and knowledge by arguing that sexual identity does not determine the production of anti-normative knowledge. Insights from queer theory are employed to interrogate the power of heteronormativity in generating 'normative' knowledge, and elucidating whether these practices are invested in particular sexual identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore the relation between sexuality and pedagogy. This theoretical concern is examined with reference to two key pedagogical moments during a first-year undergraduate course about schooling and sexuality. Through critical reflection of these episodes it is argued that when sexuality is the intellectual focus of a course, the pedagogical scene becomes inescapably 'sexual'. While existing research analyses desire between teacher and student as a potential element of the pedagogical scene, this paper investigates how sexuality might manifest more generally and offer a pedagogical resource in educational encounters. The possibility of a sexual and embodied pedagogy that explicitly invites students to be sexual subjects in a space that traditionally prioritises mind over body is considered. How teacher and student subjects are invoked and to what ends this might be pedagogically productive are also investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores 'the 5 cm rule', a regulation around student contact discovered during an investigation of the sexual culture of schooling with 16-19-year-olds in New Zealand. Implemented to stem 'inappropriate and unwanted' touching, it stipulates that students must maintain a physical distance of 5 cm at all times. It is argued this rule represents a contemporary type of biopower which forms part of the sexual culture of schooling. As a technique of corporeal regulation it is characterised by a 'loose' exercise of power, that allows for student resistance while producing subjects' 'docility-utility' (Foucault, 1980). The paper contends that the rule contributes negatively to 'the sexual culture of schooling' by constituting student sexuality as 'unruly' and 'problematic'. This stipulation also prescribes a set of gender relations that are inhibitive of mutually negotiated and pleasurable corporeal experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual methods are often marginalised in educational research and have not been employed to collect information about sexuality at school. This paper examines the viability and effectiveness of conducting research about the 'sexual cultures' of schools in New Zealand using photo-diaries and photo-elicitation. 'Effectiveness' is judged by what the visual methodologies literature purports are the benefits of these methods. These advantages include providing participants with greater autonomy over what and how data is collected. The paper argues it is feasible to employ visual methods to research sexuality in schools. Such methods offer participants alternative means of recounting their stories, can help illuminate an esoteric object of investigation like 'sexual cultures' and engage participants less likely to volunteer for sexuality research. The use of visual methods is not without challenges however. Securing ethics approval and school participation along with problems with camera retrieval and protecting participant agency were some difficulties encountered in the current study. For those wishing to pursue less conventional research methodologies in educational settings, this discussion highlights potential benefits and struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those who teach sexuality education are integral to the success of programmes that positively foster young people as sexual subjects. Knowing what makes an effective educator is therefore crucial for developing and delivering programmes that are successful in this respect. Starting from the premise that effective sexuality education meets the needs and interests of young people, this paper considers who young people think make the best educators and why. Findings are drawn from questionnaire and focus group data. Peer educators were named most frequently in questionnaire findings as the best people to teach about sexuality at school. Reasons for naming them were the same as for selecting other educator categories as 'best'. Interpreting this finding in conjunction with focus group data suggests participants valued particular educator 'qualities' more than 'who' the educator was. An argument for problematising the perceived relationship between educator identity and teaching effectiveness in sexuality education is made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to explore how we might understand young people's agency in sexuality research using visual methods. It is concerned with troubling the perception that power is held by the adult researcher and denied to youthful participants who simply submit to their authority. Rather than attempting to cast moments of young people's agency as examples where the relations of ruling are reversed, this paper endeavours to tease out the nuances inherent in young people's agency. This examination is undertaken in relation to selected episodes from research investigating the sexual culture of secondary schools using photo-diary and photo-elicitation methods. To elucidate the mechanisms of young people's agency, Butler's and Davies' work on the process of subjectification is drawn upon. Using a post-structural theoretical framework, it is argued that young people's agency involves a simultaneous mastery and submission, which is a consequence of the process of subjecthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been recognized that to be effective, sexuality education must meet the needs and interests of young people (Aggleton and Campbell, 2000). However, this acknowledgement has often manifested in adults ultimately determining what young people's needs and interests are. This article focuses on what senior school students determine as important and relevant programme content from focus group and survey data. Participants' suggestions provide a critique of current sexuality education provision that is clinical, de-eroticized and didactic. Young people's calls for content about emotions in relationships, teenage parenthood, abortion and how to make sexual activity pleasurable offer insights into how they understand themselves as sexual subjects. Student responses position them as having the right to make their own decisions about sexual activity and to access knowledge that will enable their engagement in relationships that are physically and emotionally pleasurable. This positioning sits in conflict with the preferred non-sexual identity young people are offered by the official culture of many schools (Allen, 2007). It is proposed that this tension has implications for how programmes constitute student sexuality and their effectiveness in empowering young people to view their sexuality positively and make positive sexual decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are young women and men's preferences for sexuality education content poles apart? This article explores gender differences in senior school students' suggestions for issues sexuality education should cover. Findings are analysed in relation to debate about mixed and single sex classrooms and boys' perceived disinterest in lessons. It is argued that young women and men's content preferences were largely similar on items that a majority selected for inclusion. Topics less than half of participants named revealed a greater number of gender differences. Employing theoretical insights from feminist post-structuralism, responses are also examined for how they position young people as sexual subjects and whether these conform to or deviate from perceptions of 'conventional heterosexualities'. This examination enables an understanding of how young people view themselves as sexual and whether this matches their constitution within sexuality programmes. The implications of students' content preferences and the way these position them as sexual subjects are considered for the possibilities they present for programme design and delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the place of romance in young men's lives? Do young men enact a romantic masculinity? This article examines young men's experience of romance and what investments they have in romantic identity. Drawing on a New Zealand-based sample of seventeento nineteen-year-olds, the author investigates the way in which romantic masculinity is evoked during seventeen focus-group discussions. The article explores whether romantic masculinity offers a new form of masculinity in New Zealand and to what extent it departs from hegemonic practices of "hard" masculinity. Its potential as a nonhegemonic form of masculinity that challenges oppressive heterosexual relations is also analyzed. It is argued that the particular expression of romantic masculinity evidenced in this research no longer constitutes a subordinate form of masculinity in New Zealand. Instead, "doing romance" is theorized as being reconfigured within the operation of hegemonic masculinity in a way that highlights the flexibility and stability of these practices of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite policy provision enabling sexuality education to address more than disease and pregnancy prevention, this focus continues to permeate many school programmes. This paper problematises the danger prevention emphasis in sexuality education, examines school's investment in it and asks how useful it is. The ways this kind of sexuality education may inhibit the reduction of 'negative' sexual outcomes and fail to support young people's sexual well-being is explored. Suggesting sexuality education might be conceptualisxed without this danger prevention emphasis necessitates an exploration of what might replace it. Foucault's work around an ethics of pleasure is drawn on as one example of how the objectives of sexuality education might be re-envisaged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines some of the discourses and practices through which schools produce and regulate student sexual identities. It suggests that schools' 'official culture' can be seen as a discursive strategy which identifies a preferred student subject that is 'non-sexual'. This preference is communicated through the contradictory nature of discourses and practices which constitute 'official school culture' around student sexuality. These discourses work to simultaneously acknowledge student sexuality and position young people as 'childlike'. Through the tension created by these contradictory positionings, schools can be seen to undermine the kind of sexual agency that young people might access to support their sexual well-being. It is concluded that schools' deployment of discourses around sexuality produces student sexual positionings that may in fact dilute sexuality education's 'effectiveness' (in terms of the production of sexually responsible citizens). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is concerned with some of the theoretical and methodological complexities of collecting young people's preferences for sexuality education content and using them to inform educational practice. Data are drawn from focus groups and questionnaires undertaken by 16-19-year-olds. Participants' suggestions often reflect dominant discourses of sexuality circulating in wider society, providing insight into social norms and cultural contexts in which they live. Suggestions do not reflect dominant discourses in any simple way, but involve a complex interplay of these and subordinate meanings of sexuality. When working within a methodological framework that values and centres young people's perspectives, these proposals can be problematic. As dominant discourses of sexuality often reinforce social inequalities, programme implementation of young people's suggestions may perpetuate these. How to reconcile a commitment to a methodological paradigm that prioritises young people's perspectives with the creation of sexuality education which promotes social justice is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the sexually explicit comments and references to pornography in young men's answers to a survey about sexuality education. Instead of viewing these remarks as simply impertinent and therefore discountable, I argue that they offer insights into the constitution of masculine identity and an erotic deficit in sexuality education. Many of these comments make requests for the inclusion of enfleshed (female) bodies in sexuality programmes and the use of pornographic materials (i.e. videos, magazines). These responses can be seen to represent a challenge to school authority in the way they are laden with “shock” value and push at the discursive limits of “sexual respectability”. In a school environment that seeks to deny the sexual and contain student sexuality, these statements symbolise an assertion of young men's sexual agency. Young men's remarks also offer a critique of sexuality education that is de-eroticised and which denies them as positive and legitimate sexual subjects. The implications of these comments for how sexuality education might be conceptualised are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical account of conducting focus groups with gay and lesbian youth. Drawing on the insights of queer theory it attempts to reframe issues around sexual diversity by examining the heteronormalizing processes at work during these focus groups. This analysis is undertaken through a ‘study of the limits’ of the author’s own thoughts and practice while implementing a research methodology that endeavored to destabilize heterosexuality. The aim of this examination is to better understand the way in which heteronormativity operates to discursively constitute heterosexual normalcy and render anything but thinking ‘straight’ unintelligible. In the course of such analysis the way in which sexual identity politics are played out between gay and lesbian participants and a straight researcher is addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do young people conceptualise ‘effective’ sexuality education? This paper explores 16‐year‐old to 19‐year‐old New Zealanders' vision of effective sexuality education as it emerges in answers to a survey question about improving programmes at secondary school. Young people's responses suggest that their view of what makes sexuality education effective may diverge from those who perceive a reduction in sexually transmissible infections and unplanned pregnancy as ultimate markers of effectiveness. Participants in this study referred to other criteria around aspects of classroom structure, curriculum content and teacher competency as rendering programmes effective. Through their comments young people are positioned more positively and legitimately as sexual subjects than they are typically constituted in programmes that emphasise reducing negative outcomes of sexual activity. It is proposed that giving more weight to young people's view of effective sexuality education, and the constitution of student sexuality this implies, could be beneficial to their sexual health and well‐being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of ‘the school’ as a set of institutional processes and practices that shape the possibilities of educational research forms the focus of this article. It is argued that the discursive and material practices that render schools agencies of cultural reproduction also have effects for what research can be undertaken in them and how. With reference to a series of ‘episodes’ that occurred during research about young people and sexuality in New Zealand, evidence for how schools shape research endeavours is provided. These examples present a complex picture of the way in which schools simultaneously police and are regulated by symbolic boundaries of gender and sexuality. How school disciplinary power works to effect what it is possible to claim about the voluntary nature of student research participation is also explored. It is argued that through the powerful discursive and material practices that occur in schools, these institutions can impede research that attempts to transgress dominant meanings about gender and sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]